Don’t Be Afraid Of Vintage Watches!

Let’s Get Some Stuff Out Of The Way:

You are not a secret agent. You don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. You don’t jump cars over cliffs. You don’t fight bad guys underwater with spears and karate kicks. You wake up too early because your kid is screaming, or because your neighbors are making too much noise. You work from home, and mainly wear sweatpants these days. That’s okay. We don’t say this stuff to make you sad; God knows there’s enough of that going around these days. We say all this to remind you not to be afraid of vintage watches.

Vintage Watches: Don’t be afraid of them.

Lots of people email us and DM us on Instagram and hit us up online about watches. Guys we used to go to high school with, ladies we work with, friends and ‘randos’ alike. We LOVE this, because talking about watches is way more fun than doing most other forms of work. But so many people seem scared. ‘How do I buy a vintage watch?’ The same way you buy basically anything else in the entire world in the present day; you wake up, say you’re going to do ‘work stuff,’ but instead login to an online shopping portal and type your credit card info into the little boxes on the screen.

80s and 90s watches count as well! Go ahead + get the one you wanted as a kid.

A week or two later you get a little box in the mail. Hopefully, it’s a watch! Bam. That’s it. ‘But what if it doesn’t run 100 percent perfect!’ Well, my dude (or homegirl,) it’s a vintage watch. Old stuff, especially stuff that’s fifty or so years old, doesn’t always work absolutely perfectly. Big deal! Who cares. This goes back to the you-are-not-a-superhero diatribe in the beginning of this article. Remember; you’re not James Bond. If your watch is running 5 minutes slow or fast per day, who cares? You have a phone in your pocket. If you really give a crap about it, take it to a watchmaker and have it fixed.

Can’t be fixed? Well, get over it. Don’t ever buy anything that you’re too afraid to take a loss on. That’s some free life advice. Move on. Most vintage watches are cheap. We’re talking under a couple hundred bucks. Buy another one! Again unlike say a car or a motorcycle, a vintage watch is not a ‘this must work perfectly or I die’ piece of equipment. Far from it! As mentioned previously, you already have a phone in your pocket, So a watch is just for fun! Let it be fun. Have fun. (Remember fun?)

The reason again for the reality check in the beginning of the article is to fight back against the marketing of the watch industry. If you look at most watch dials, you’ll see things like ‘300M Waterproof,’ or ‘Officially Certified Chronometer,’ and other malarkey. Great. Sweet. But let’s be honest; when was the last time you went diving? When was the last time you were subjected to G-Forces? Yeah, exactly. A watch is a piece of jewelry. A piece of jewelry with a functional component, sure, but at the end of the day it’s a thing you have because it looks cool, feels cool. (Maybe it is cool!)

This had a ‘Buy It Now’ of 100USD on eBay at the time of writing.

After all this negative stuff, here’s some positivity: most vintage watches still work pretty darn good. Why? Because watches aren’t all that high-tech, and by the ’30s or ’40s humankind basically figured out how to make them work. It’s pretty normal to pick up a Swiss watch from the ’50s or ’60s, wind it up, and it will just work. Even more so if it’s a Japanese watch from more modern times, and more so still if it’s an even newer piece. Unlike a phone which is gonna die in 5 years tops, good watches were made to last a hundred years or more.

You literally can pass them on to your kids if you want.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want Grandpa’s old iPhone 4S.

His Rolex tho?

Yes sir.

Just don’t take the darned thing into the water. Just don’t. Now, if that’s something you really do feel like doing, get it tested first. But again, this is kind of one risk that has almost no upside. Okay, so you have a real Rolex or whatever, so you wanna wear it in the pool. Go ahead. Especially if you got it tested first, and you’re a ‘one watch’ kind of person, or you absolutely have to. But if that thing floods you’re the idiot, not us. We’re in that same pool with a 200 dollar Seiko and a gin-and-tonic, and feeling extremely relaxed.

You can even find watches from brands like Omega under $1000.

Now that we got the Water Thing out of the way, we can talk again about how vintage watches are pretty damned amazing. First off, if you buy one, it already has a bunch of scratches and marks on it. Well, hopefully it does, and this is good. Because this also keeps you from being Watch Douche #1, who is super afraid of getting his or her watch dirty or scratched up. It’s already scratched, so you can relax. Secondly; if you buy a vintage watch instead of a new one (and manage not to lose it or break it) you’ll never lose money on the thing. Buying watches as ‘investments’ is not really recommended, but just like how a new car depreciates while a classic car doesn’t…vintage watches sorta live in that same fiscal universe.

Three: if you don’t care about brand names, you can build a collection of cool vintage watches for a grand total of a few hundred bucks. (If you don’t have a few hundred bucks to spare, don’t read any more of this article; you might wanna think about employment first.) Also: you shouldn’t really care about brand names. Not just at first, but in general. This is another life lesson, free of charge. This keeps you from turning into Watch Douche #2, the Rolex Douche. Don’t get us wrong, Rolex as a brand is pretty rad. Especially the vintage stuff. But you don’t want to turn into That Guy, so don’t let it happen. End of. Plus you’d miss out on so many other cool pieces if you focus solely on Rollies.

Amazing. Beautiful. Under $999. (Same goes for the Seiko at the top of the page.)

So go ahead! Buy a vintage watch. There are an infinite amount of sizes, styles, and colors to choose from. Get it from eBay/Craigslist/Gumtree if you’re feeling dangerous, or just buy one from an online dealer if you’re not up for a potential headache. Wear it. Buy new straps for it. Wind it up every morning, like your mother or father or grandmother or grandfather used to do. Take it to a watchmaker every few years for a tune-up. After a while, you might want another one. Soon, you’ll have a full-fledged problem like us!

And don’t forget to have fun. Life should be as fun as possible.

-Curated Classics