Oh, The Hardships of This Business

Being that buying and selling watches is a large segment of my income, I simply can’t afford to grow too attached to them. On the other hand, as a watch enthusiast, I often get the urge to hoard them and keep them for my very own. One of the perks of being in this business, of course, is that I often get to wear the watches for a little while before I find them a more permanent home. I know it’s time to sell them or at least stop wearing them if I start calling them “My Precious”. But then there are the ones that are gone just too damn soon.

           

In the last couple of years, only three watches really jump out at me as having moved entirely too fast.  In a lot of ways I’m glad they did, because if I still think about them now I can’t imagine if I had time to bond with them. I know, boo-hoo and woe is me, I don’t get to keep my inventory.

The first watch that sticks out in my head was a 1967 Omega Speedmaster. I only had the watch for a couple of days but, in all fairness, I had a previous call from someone looking for one. I mean he was literally looking for that year and had asked me about a week prior to it coming in.

The second one was an Audemars Piguet Millenary Kasparov. What a nice watch that was. It came in as part of a package deal and was out the door less than 8 hours later with another package deal. I think my partner saw my eyes light up a little on that one, he knows I’m a huge fan of Audemars, one of the few watches that I own personally is an Audemars that I had given my father for his 75^th birthday and inherited back several years later.

The last one was a Patek Philippe Calatrava from the mid 1950’s. That one I actually did buy for myself (kind of). I bought it one day at a restaurant by the jewelers building in Chicago and sold it less than a half hour later when I was in the building. Why that one sticks out is for two reasons, it was the first Patek I ever owned personally (albeit shortly) and it was the quickest I ever sold a watch. I mean, I literally just crossed the street and sold it without even trying.

I have sold other watches within a day or even sometimes the same day I get them in, it’s actually quite common, these are just the ones that stick out in my mind.