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By Keith W. Strandberg - Arabian Watches & Jewellery Magazine
Vintage has really taken over the watch industry and it shows no sign of slowing down. When we say vintage, we mean: heritage-inspired timepieces; reinterpreted and modernized archival designs; real vintage, pre-owned watches; and even new watches powered by vintage movements. Heritage is hotter than it’s ever been.
Vintage Styles
There are so many companies with vintage designs that it’s hard to keep track of them all. This is not to say everyone with a vintage watch is a bandwagon-jumper, as nostalgic designs make sense for a brand inspired by their own archival pieces or brands with a long history.
For example, Jaeger-LeCoultre introduced the iconic Reverso 81 years ago, and they have a number of models in their current line, from cutting-edge complications to métier d’art masterpieces as well as elegant timepieces, but they all hark back to that initial, innovative design.
You have to admit, a retooled vintage design is really cool. An actual vintage watch would be way too small for today, as 38mm was considered a big watch just ten years ago, so companies coming out with these watches have increased the size a bit in a nod to today’s watch styles.
Some of the watch industry’s biggest names have vintage-inspired offerings, including brands like Bell & Ross, Vulcain, Zenith, TAG Heuer, Hamilton, Hanhart, Longines, Corum, Alpina, Ball, Tudor, GP, Gant and more.
There’s something about a vintage design that is really appealing. Compared to the watches of today, vintage-inspired watches are cleanly designed, uncluttered and evocative of a simpler time.
Shinola, a new company founded in Detroit, Michigan in the US, is a partnership between Bedrock Manufacturing and Ronda, a Swiss movement maker. Using the slogan “Built in Detroit” and advertising taglines like “Where America is Made,” “To Those Who Have Written Off Detroit, We Give You The Birdy” and “The Long Tradition of Detroit Watchmaking Has Just Begun,” Shinola watches (and they also make bicycles, leather goods and more) have a vintage feel but a modern-day vision – to bring industrial, volume watchmaking back to the US. With a current capacity of 500,000 watches, and an option to expand to one million, Shinola has a bright future indeed and has so far been accepted really well.
New Watches, Vintage Movements
Another trend could be something out of a 1950s horror movie -- “The Watch Movement That Wouldn’t Die.” A consequence of the 1970s quartz crisis, where the emergence of quartz watches almost killed the mechanical watch industry, is that there are stockpiles of vintage movements that have never been used in watches. Many of these movements were sold for pennies on the dollar just to liquidate them, instead of being destroyed or dumped into landfills and lakes, while still others were simply forgotten about in storage as companies transferred their production to quartz movements.
However they have come back from the dead, we’re happy they did.
Several companies are working on refurbishing these old movements and putting them into new watches, allowing you to buy a true piece of watchmaking history.
The undeniable leader in this is Armand Nicolet, who kind of backed into the production of vintage movements. A classically-styled watch brand, Armand Nicolet, under the direction of Rolando Braga, discovered a stockpile of vintage movements in their historical factory in Tramelan, Switzerland. Eager to see what the market reaction would be, the brand undertook the daunting task of refurbishing these movements and began to offer them as limited editions.
The success has been phenomenal, with Armand Nicolet making around 1,000 of these “new-old” watches each year. It has become a bigger part of his business than Braga ever thought it would, and its success has helped his other collections gain traction.
“You need something to set your brand apart in today’s world,” Braga says. “Our vintage movement limited editions do that, with their mixture of watchmaking history and modern performance.”
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Find some old movements, spruce them up and put them into a modern case and sell them.
Not so fast.
“The main difficulty in reworking vintage movements is the fact that quality standards have changed a lot over the years, so of course the performance of a movement that was acceptable 40 years ago has now to be upgraded in order to achieve the precision that is required today,” Braga explains. His team, who have gained a tremendous amount of hands-on knowledge over the years they have been doing this, has to disassemble the movement, map it out using modern day software, see where things have to be improved or replaced (e.g. the mainspring, the balance wheel, the escapement, etc.), due to improvements in modern watchmaking.
Many new parts have to be made by Armand Nicolet’s network of suppliers, to the brand’s specs. What needs to be done depends on the state the vintage movement is in when the work begins.
“Obviously there are movements that need less work but each vintage movement has its own peculiarity and because these movements are collectors’ pieces, they are all interesting despite the huge investment they require,” Braga explains. “We have set up a specialized team dedicated only to this type of work. This team needs very expensive special equipment and tools, because that’s the only way to get good results, otherwise it would have only been a waste of time and money.”
Other companies restoring and reusing vintage movements are Grieb-Benzinger, Chronoswiss, Zenith, Antoine Preziuso, Arcadia and others.
The finished product is a modern watch with a vintage heart, a tangible piece of watchmaking history unlike any other watch on the market.
One of the intriguing things about vintage movements is that there are a finite number of these special calibers out there. No one is making these movements anymore – even if a modern movement is based on a historical one, it’s not the same thing as an actual movement from the 1940s.
And when they are gone, they are gone...and they will never return.
Actual Vintage Watches
Real vintage watches are also seeing a resurgence as historical watches are sold at auction for incredible amounts. You don’t have to spend a fortune, however, as many retailers have instituted a “pre-owned” program, where customers can trade in an existing watch for credit on another purchase. This means that there is often a good selection of certified pre-owned watches on hand from which to choose.
Vintage, inspired by a bygone era, is here to stay in its many forms. Surprising how watches that were designed and created decades ago can still have an impact on our wrists today? Not to us...