A Case for Bespoke Straps
As collectors of most things will know there is always the urge to acquire something new, to change things up. Another option rather than buying a new watch outright would be to change the strap, that small change can provide the needed change to make something exciting again. Maybe a canvas or perlon strap to “dress down” a dressier watch. To add another touch of personalization a custom made or bespoke strap can make all the difference, the right size to fit your wrist correctly, the exact colour and material you want, the stitching style or end cut you want, and on and on. These options aren’t limited to only leather straps, even options like the Erika’s Originals MN straps are available made to your wrist size among other personalization options. Admittedly I am far from being someone who dresses formally, the most dressed up I get is a polo or at most a button down shirt with jeans so I tend to lean towards those more casual offerings.
Sometimes you run into a situation where you have a watch with an odd lug size or case shape, or both in the case of my 38 series Quartz VFA. Bespoke choices fill a gap where off-the-shelf just isn’t an option, in this instance I needed something that fit 16mm lugs but stepped out to 19mm to match the case shape while still clearing the hooded lugs. I went with a local strap maker, Walter aka Ten to One (X:1), who helped walk me through the process of selecting materials, colours, and stitching. Through our discussions we discussed lengths, thickness, and all the other details that would go into the strap. In the end I went with a tobacco brown pig skin with an aqua blue kangaroo lining. Once my commission was completed I paired it with the 16mm buckle from a Grand Seiko SBGV009 (part number AA0FPSA01B) to complete the package. The end result more than met my expectations and I feel it suits the watch well.
If you can’t find a strap that suits your wants or needs don’t be afraid of going the bespoke route, it may seem intimidating but it really isn’t. Sure, it might take longer than just ordering a generic strap off Amazon or similar but that is a small price to have what you actually want. It is worth keeping in mind that there is no way around the fact that a custom strap will be more expensive than an otherwise comparable mass produced offerings - sometimes by orders of magnitude - but you have to remember that labour, time, craftsmanship, and experience have a price beyond just material cost. I’ve seen posts on forums and in comment sections of YouTube videos along the lines of “why pay more than $100 for custom when I can get a Barton strap for $20?”, naturally the lower price of the Barton offering benefits massively from the quantity they are produced and the lower quality of the materials; this is the same argument that comes up when talking about the prices of watches in general. Larger scale factory produced products will always have a price advantage purely based off the economies of scale, when you order a bespoke item (especially with something that is a hand craft like making watch straps) you are often paying for one person to craft it from beginning to end to your specifications. For a rough hypothetical example of why the cost is what it is let's assume a strap takes a full working day’s worth of labour (8 hours) to craft from start to finish - though not necessarily in one sitting. Even at US Federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr that is $58 before even taking into account material cost. So where am I going with this? I don’t really know, I’m just rambling. The decision of if it is worth it or not is your own choice to make but for me, in some cases, it absolutely is.
Wabi Sabi
There is something so appealing about things that show age, a previous life lived. I don’t mean completely trashed, though there are cases where that could apply, but more where something is worn in ways that Hollywood prop-makes strive to replicate, an authentic “lived-in” feel of textures and tones, the randomness that only passage of time can truly create. In the car world it would be like comparing an all original barn-find with decades of use (and storage) to a full concourse level rotisserie restoration - or worse, a new build with an original VIN plate like you often see with some classics like ‘32 Ford V8 Coupes or Mustangs.
I know some people won’t agree with me but that's fine, everyone has different tastes. What I love is something that doesn’t shy away from being used and showing it, there might be some dings and imperfections but still has all the features you could hope for. Rock chips, faded paint. Sometimes things are a bit more on the rough side but still have some unbeatable character with untold stories of long lost memories. It doesn’t even need to be something particularly special or unique, the imperfections that come with time are a special kind of beauty.
With watches it is on a far more personal level than most other things, this is something that someone wore through their day-to-day life, through good times and bad. While sometimes you might be lucky enough to have a story to tie to it more often than not the stories tied to it are a mystery. It could be as simple as a birthday, a wedding, mariage, an anniversary or long service award. I could be something that someone carried through school or through combat, something that traveled the world, went to space, or just stayed on the family farm. Sometimes there are clues - names, dates, places - but the telltale signs of use tell even more of a story.
Memories fade, time moves on, the marks from its passing, however, remain and are there to be enjoyed. Embrace wabi sabi, the imperfections that come with age and use are irreplaceable.
Nostalgia
It is funny how things come up and you see things you haven’t seen in a long time and it ties into your current experiences in ways you don’t expect. After my last post I happened to be looking through some scans of photos from the 90s my dad sent and one thing stuck out. There was a photo of me sitting on a bench in Zurich opening a bottle of water after our flight from Atlanta. That isn’t all that surprising, but something struck me, not only was my trusty Flik Flak on my wrist but there was another watch on there too - full Nicolas Hayek style. I had completely forgotten about that watch. Admittedly I can’t recall what it was exactly but I have hazy memories of it having a black case and dial but not much beyond that. I’ll have to see if it is hiding in a box somewhere at my parent’s next time I visit…
“Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent.”
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quartz Watches
Like many people of my generation my first watch was a Swatch - or more specifically a Flik Flak kids watch given to me by my grandfather after one of his trips to Europe in the early 1990s. I didn't know it then but that was the start of something of an obsession. Back then the whole “quartz=bad” mentality common in the watch community these days (especially among people just starting down the rabbit hole) really didn’t matter. It was MY watch and it was COOL.
Press photo courtesy of Swatch/Flik Flak
From middle school and into high school I was in the Boy Scouts, naturally one of the things you want to have alongside your pocket knife is a trusty watch. At that time I inevitably had one of the ubiquitous “tough” watches, a Timex Ironman Triathlon, I can’t remember if there was any reason why I got that over something else like a G-Shock but honestly it was probably just that it was cheaper. I still have that watch though the original strap snapped off and was replaced by a cheap nato long ago.
Timex Ironman Triathlon
Years later as I was re-discovering watches on my own I found myself falling into that same trap after countless blog posts and YouTube videos preaching “why would you want some shitty quartz watch, automatics are superior!”. Having mostly been exposed to the inescapable ticking of cheap Timex analogue models that was pretty much all I thought quartz could ever be but then I fell down the hole further and started learning about the history of quartz and the so-called “quartz crisis”. I’ll have to expand on my thoughts about that period at a later date because that is a whole other can of worms. While browsing through listings for vintage Seikos I kept running into Lord Quartz, King Quartz, and Grand Quartz. The more I saw them the more I was intrigued up until the point I caved and bought one out of curiosity. I was hooked.
Seiko 0853-8001 King Quartz
My experience with that first vintage King Quartz was quite eye-opening to just how special and premium quartz was in those early years before the technology progressed to the point of being able to be cheaply produced and disposable. From then on I realized that just because a watch has a quartz movement doesn’t mean it is cheap or any less valid than any mechanical watch. With that said there is a very real appeal to the more cost effective nature of quartz watches, you can get some absolutely killer stuff for a fraction of what the mechanical equivalent would go for.
IWC Porsche Design IW3732
There is no getting around the fact that spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a completely outdated and irrelevant piece of technical jewelry is crazy. Why do we do it? I guess that applies to just about any hobby, it is purely for enjoyment. Through high school and college one source of enjoyment was Top Gear, or at least the incarnation with Jeremy Clarkson , Richard Hammond, and James May. A stand-out snippet of their shenanigans was during a “News” segment where they were discussing Porsche Design products and Jeremy put the lit bowl end of a pipe into his mouth (because its a 911 Porsche so the hot bit goes at the back, naturally) which went well in true Top Gear fashion. In re-watching that episode years later I figured I’d poke around on eBay and see what Porsche Design stuff was available which is when I ran into that awesome IWC chronograph. That was all I needed to cement my conversion to loving quartz watches.