Frustration is often the impetus for starting a business, and that’s exactly what produced heist-out, a glossy watch magazine introduced in May 2023 — and now it is teaming with Sotheby’s Geneva for what is described as a subversive kind of auction.

Lorenzo Maillard and Maxime Couturier had been working for several years at the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, a nonprofit watch industry organization in Geneva, when they began to realize how dissatisfied they were.

“We had the same vision of what we should be talking about in the watchmaking world,” Mr. Maillard, 30, recalled, adding that he was tired of seeing the same generic watch ads everywhere. “But each time we worked with different brands, the projects were amazing on paper, but as soon as you went through the different steps, the project’s essence and beautiful aspects were removed.”

Mr. Couturier, 33, remembers the breaking point. “We were having a drink in Geneva Old Town and realized we had to do something that was completely free, without brands,” he said. “Brands said they wanted to push the boundaries but as soon as we proposed a concept, it started to get diluted.”

The duo initially toyed with the idea of creating fliers, to be distributed by skateboarders during the 2023 Watches and Wonders Geneva, the industry’s largest trade fair. But they settled on a magazine — with a name that is a play on the slang term “iced out,” for diamond-encrusted watches — and initially planned that it would be 16 pages.