OUR FOUNDER TGV

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Tristano Geoffry Veneto, or “TGV” as he’s best known, is a content creator, watch designer, heritage watch brand consultant, and pioneer of the world’s first watch focused lifestyle social media content. Founder of The Urban Gentry YouTube channel in 2014, TGV was the world’s first watch influencer who pioneered a style and format that would inspire other watch related social media content since. Born in London, his early childhood was spent in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, followed by a return to Wimbledon, London, where he learned English. His education includes art school in Norwich, England, Neorealist Italian cinema in Florence, Italy, and audio engineering in New York City, which he eventually made his home. In between working on sound recording and engineering projects for television commercials, TGV began to share his lifelong passion for collecting watches online, during the infancy of social media.

“Back then, nobody was talking about watches in videos like that. In fact, it was seen as strange, since it was such a niche subject, almost nerdy. I had a cheap little digital camcorder as this was before smartphones with fancy cameras, and I was deeply inspired by the Dogma 95 style of recording. However, combining it with things like travel, clothes, EDC, and related subjects seemed natural to me, as it was already a part of my daily life.”

The Urban Gentry is an amalgamation of TGV’s life experiences and contrasting cultural background, with his upbringing being a mix of British upper class and Italian working class family origins, brought into the contemporary setting of New York City. With his deep love for culture, cinema, history, art, music, literature, horology, and design, his unique background, along with his passion for documenting his life experiences and the things he loves, he infused many of these elements into the analysis of watches at all price points. This approach was entirely new for the time, but would then become widespread as social media inevitably grew worldwide, and technology allowed it to expand exponentially. 

Before the over saturation of watch channels, The Urban Gentry made history as the first watch channel ever to secure the YouTube Silver Play Button (aka the YouTube Silver Creator Award). He was also the first social media personality to visit prestigious watch factories and document his experiences in online videos, and to directly collaborate on watch designs with historic brands, nearly a decade before these milestones were widely adopted by the rest of the watch industry. TGV has influenced the way in which watches are talked about online, far beyond his social media platforms, with  The Urban Gentry lingo like “wristwatch check” and “State Of The Collection” style videos, even coining nicknames for specific watches. Naturally, the rest of the watch world followed, and today, with the commercialization of social media with the influx of watch dealer content and corporate created watch media, The Urban Gentry remains a truly independent voice in the genre it started, and is widely respected for bringing a generation into the hobby of watch collecting.