If you can afford your daily Starbucks, you can afford to rent a blingy wristwatch.
That’s the latest pitch from Eleven James, a New York-based luxury watch rental service that is rolling out what it calls an “affordable” monthly package for the horologically curious.
For $149 a month, subscribers to Eleven James’s “Enthusiast Collection” can rent three watches over the course of a year, rotating to a new model once every four months, the company announced Thursday.
The entry-level package — which subscribers can choose from a selection of more than three dozen models priced in the $3,000 to $7,000 range — is half the price of Eleven James’s previous entry-level program, which draws from an assortment priced between $7,000 and $15,000.
Eleven James bills itself as a man’s answer to Rent The Runway, the fast-growing site that rents out pricey party dresses, or handbag-rental sites like Le Tote and Bag Borrow or Steal.
Eleven James’s new, entry-level package is aimed especially at millennials who have grown up telling time with their phones rather than watches, founder and CEO Randy Brandoff said.
“This is for the curious customer who has maybe owned between zero and three watches,” Brandoff told The Post. “They’re dipping their toes into the water.”
Those who catch the itch might aspire to the “Virtuoso” collection, in which members for $1,500 a month can choose from timepieces priced at upwards of $50,000, including the Rolex Skydweller and the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5980-1A.
That said, Brandoff is noncommittal when it comes to the question of stocking the new Apple Watch — even the models that sell as high as $17,000.
“The feeling you get from the craftsmanship, the uniqueness, the heritage of mechanical watches is profoundly different from the feeling one will get from the Apple Watch or any other wearable,” according to Brandoff.
Having previously done a stint as chief marketing officer of the NetJets airplane-rental service owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Brandoff says pricey wristwatches are the latest example of a luxury item that needn’t be a
major capital investment.
“Why do people lease cars instead of buying them? Variety,” Brandoff says.