He’s living his Bolivian dream, in an American mall

As far back as he can remember — and even before that — Marcelo Sandivar wanted to be a watchmaker.

When he was barely 3 years old, his family tells him, he stood by his father’s workbench, mesmerized by his movements.

Jorge Sandivar was a watchmaker. He lived with his wife and nine children in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Part of his home was his shop, where he worked on watches from morning to night. Marcelo was his sidekick.

His father wouldn’t let Marcelo touch his tools or the watches he was working on until he was older. So he learned by observation. By the time he was 5 or 6, he was handing his dad tools before Jorge even realized he needed them.

Later on, Marcelo would attend schools to learn this watch repairing specialty or that, but his real training was as homegrown as they come.

If you want to see someone living their dream, drive to the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, walk down the center aisle, past H&M and Oakley and Lovesac and Banana Republic and Zara and all the rest, until, right in front of The Container Store, you’ll run into 63-year-old Marcelo Sandivar repairing watches.

You can’t miss him. He is literally in the center of the mall. His watch repair and watch-selling business, Fashion Watch & Clock, is in a portable kiosk that mall management rolls out by the information sign and benches where worn-out spouses can take a breather.

“I always wanted to have my own shop in the U.S.,” says Marcelo, proudly, as mall traffic maneuvers around his kiosk like Tour de France riders encountering a traffic circle.

Dressed in a clean white lab coat, Marcelo shuts out the hubbub as he bends over his workbench and intricately works on watches left in his care. Occasionally a curious passerby will stop and watch, like Marcelo watched his father long ago.

Marcelo’s first stay in the United States was in the mid-1990s. He and his wife, Yunis, moved with their three young children, Oliver, Gisel and Benjamin, to Annandale, Virginia, where Marcelo found work repairing watches in a retail store and ended up being sponsored by the store’s owners to begin the family’s path to citizenship.

The family later returned to Bolivia so Marcelo and Yunis could care for their aging parents.

Fast forward to 2014, when Gisel’s husband, Alvaro, a software engineer, accepted a job offer from a Utah company and relocated to Salt Lake City. Gisel asked her parents if they’d be interested in moving here too, to support her family and help the transition.

“That’s why my dad is here,” says Gisel.

For a time, Marcelo found work repairing watches for other companies. But who he really wanted to work for was himself.

In the early part of 2019, he told Gisel about his plan to open a little watch-repairing cart in the mall. The fact that he was almost 60 did not deter him. He asked her if she’d support him. She said yes. When her brothers, both of whom live in Utah, heard about the plan, they were also all in.

“He always supported us,” she says, “now we’re all supporting his dream.”

In July 2019, with no fanfare, no advertising, no corporate headquarters helping with the launch, Fashion Watch & Clock opened for business in the middle of the mall.

“We didn’t have money for a store front,” says Gisel. “We needed foot traffic and that’s what we got. We’ve grown entirely by word of mouth.”

Even the pandemic didn’t stop them. They shut down for a time, but started right back up.

The secret to their success? Marcelo cites customer service as a big reason. “We want to do things the right way and keep the customer happy,” he says.

But the real secret, says Gisel, is her dad.

In a typical cookie-cutter mall lined with the usual national brand franchise stores, a hard-working craftsman in a white lab coat bent over his workbench is an anomaly.

“That’s where we get customers, people walking by seeing him,” says Gisel. “If he’s here, we make double or triple what we’d make if it’s anybody else.”

The business has grown, Gisel says, to the point that mall management has given the Sandivars permission to move into a bigger, more permanent kiosk in a location about 100 feet from their present spot. If all goes as planned, they’ll move by October.

“This has become too small,” observes Marcelo as he surveys the little cart he has worked out of the past four years. He’s smiling as he says it. “I know this is a good business,” he adds, “I have a lot of skills and a lot of knowledge. I learned it all from my father.”