Vintage Watches Shine Again : Market Booms for Old-Time Timepieces That Have Some Personality

For Brice Woodward, time stopped in the 1960s.

That’s when Woodward says most of the world’s watchmakers stopped making wristwatches with “personality.”

Plastic Swatches and mass-produced quartz timepieces doomed to expire in five or 10 years are not for Woodward. Neither are the disposable digital watches with their fancy calculator functions. He leaves those to “computer wiz boys poking at their watches with toothpicks.”

“For $20 you can get a watch that keeps time to the millisecond, but it has no character,” says Woodward, who sells watches made during the “golden years” of the 1910s through 1950s at his two Vintage Time shops in Laguna Beach. “These old watches are truly timeless.”

Woodward longs for the days when watches had to be wound by hand, when they ran on a complex system of mechanical movements, when they had character.

“The old watches are not boringly accurate,” he says. “If you’re the owner of a vintage watch, you might be fashionably late.”

As time goes by, more people have come to share his appreciation for vintage watches.

“Ten years ago old wristwatches didn’t have a following,” Woodward says. “But things are starting to boom.”

The value of old watches has escalated, especially during the past five years, according to Woodward. A gold-filled Gruen “Curvex” watch, so named because its body curved to conform to the wrist, cost about $30 10 years ago and $150 five years ago. It now fetches about $950.

“The watch craze has hit us with a vengeance,” says Roger Grafstein, owner of Grafstein & Co., a Santa Ana jeweler that buys, restores and sells classic timepieces. “Every week people come in with older watches.”

“I once had a sheriff’s deputy come down from Los Angeles to get an appraisal on a watch his father-in-law left him. From where he stood I could see he was wearing a cheap twist-o-flex watchband. I figured it was a cheap watch. Then he flipped his wrist over and there was the rarest 1950s Patek-Philippe.

“I said, ‘Sit down, Sarge.’

“I asked him if he had any idea how much his watch was worth. He said five or six thousand dollars. I said, ‘I think this is going to be one of the happiest days of your life. I’m prepared to pay you $98,000 for that watch.’ I thought I’d have to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“We’ve had hundreds of these kind of experiences over the past few years. These valuable watches are just kicking around in drawers.”

Watches once treated as yesterday’s junk have become sought-after treasures. People can spend from a few hundred dollars for an average vintage watch to a quarter of a million on a vintage Rolex, Patek-Philippe or Cartier.

“Is it a search for our roots? Is it sentimental? Is it a longing to go back to the old ways when things were done right? I don’t know,” Grafstein says. “We didn’t have a disposable society back then. We bought things to last. We didn’t have a watch for every different outfit.”

Modern watchmakers, eager to tap into the nostalgia trend, have been churning out quartz imitations of vintage styles.

“For many people, especially men, wearing a vintage watch might be the only fashion statement they’re willing to make,” Woodward says.

There are old watches to suit “Mr. Super Conservative” or someone with a fashion flair.

Vintage watches had unique faces in all shapes and sizes, some bigger than a silver dollar, some smaller than a pea, some octagon and some oval.

Their dials were usually white, black, gold or copper. Some had bold, Deco designs or sweet round Victorian faces. Woodward has a 1916 Waltham watch with pink blossoms painted on its face and gold gilt circles around its markers.

Bezels, the metal frames that hold the dials, were sometimes adorned with gold filigree, enamel designs or even diamonds. The watch cases were equally impressive, often fashioned out of 14- or 18-karat gold.

“There are so many little subtleties,” Woodward says. “They all have diverse personalities.”

He prizes the old watches as much for their craftsmanship as their style.

In a throwaway society, one-half expects a watch to break down after a few years. Vintage watches can tick away for a lifetime or longer.

“You can’t drop them or get them wet,” Woodward says. “But if you have a decent quality old watch, it can run 100 years or more. A new watch might last two, five or 10 years.”

Instead of a computer chip hooked up to a battery, mechanical watches have hundreds of moving parts. Pry one open, and you’ll see a marvel of mechanics, its miniature wheels and gears driven by a mainspring.

“They work as hard as any car,” Woodward says.

He knows what makes them tick. While studying art in London, he would pull watches apart and make them into collages.

“I went from a watch destroyer to a watch preserver,” he says. “I didn’t have the heart to tear apart the old pretty ones.” He started collecting watches in 1971 and opened his Vintage Time shop in 1980.

As collectibles go, the wristwatch is relatively new.

Watches have been around since the 1500s, but they didn’t switch from the pocket to the wrist until World War I, according to Woodward. Checking one’s pocket watch while fighting in the trenches or driving a tank proved terribly inconvenient.

The first wristwatches looked like pocket watches with straps. Later, as competition between watch manufacturers intensified, they became more stylized.

With the exception of Cartier in France, most fine watches were produced by Swiss or American companies during the ‘20s through the ‘50s. Swiss watchmakers such as Rolex, Patek-Philippe, Vacheron-Constantin and Audemar-Piquets competed with American companies such as Elgin, Illinois, Hamilton, Gruen, Waltham and Bulova, giving rise to an array of innovative timepieces.

Bulova, for instance, introduced the “Photo-Watch.” Its face pops open so one can carry around a picture of a loved one inside. Patek-Philippe produced watches that had perpetual calendars. They showed the month and date on their dials, even taking into account leap year--no small feat considering it was all done with wheels and gears, not a microchip.

Vintage watches sell for $200 on up for a gold-filled watch, and $600 on up for a 14-karat model.

Woodward has associates who look all over the country for old watches. He occasionally acquires them through estate sales and antique shops, but the supply has dwindled as more people have come to recognize the watches’ value.

“Everybody’s doing it now,” he says.

Inexperienced buyers often fail to consider the condition or quality of the watch. If a watch is broken, it can’t be fixed if there are no available parts.

“The only drawback to vintage watches is the care required, and they’re more fragile by nature,” Woodward says. Still, he prefers the old to the new.

“It might be old and have to be wound, but it will be there a century later.”