This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.
You have a watch—maybe multiple—that will time something at the push of its button. What I bet you don’t have is a device that tells you the time and, when you depress the pusher on the side, dispense Pez—I’d like to see your precious chronographs do that.
In the ‘90s, watches were an essential piece of every marketing brief on earth. The proliferation of quartz technology and the ease of making timepieces meant that nearly every brand and company in the world wanted in on the action. If you wanted, for example, a watch to celebrate the release of Robin Williams’s 1997 film Flubber, you were in luck—they made one inexplicably, in collaboration with Dr. Pepper.
The ‘90s were the golden era of these novelty watches. Now, pieces once destined for landfills are riding a wave of nostalgia and back into our watch rotations. It’s hard to believe, but at one point there was a demand for watches quickly printed with athletes, brands, cartoons—even popular characters from commercials.
Many quote-unquote serious collectors think of their watches as heirlooms, or at least heirloom-grade. Mechanical pieces that can last a lifetime and be passed down from one generation to the next. These watches get better with age as dials turn tropical and a bezel warms with the scratches and marks from battles lost with tables and desks. They’ve lived a life.
But the junk-drawer watches I’m talking about were never designed to be passed down through the family tree. After the quartz revolution, companies like Swatch pushed the idea of the Fashion Watch. This category of timepieces were meant to be switched out every day based on your mood or look. Timepieces could be produced so quickly that customers started wearing them like T-shirts, looking for watches that could convey their personality, fandoms, or just embrace a fad. I’d argue that these goofy novelty watches get better with age, too. The reasoning is just different: Novelty timepieces benefit from the sepia-toned glasses of nostalgia we view them through.
I’ve been thinking about junk watches a lot as the dark clouds of the current watch industry crowd in on us. Whether you’re looking at primary or secondary market statistics, every number seems to be appearing in foreboding red as declines in sales stack up over the quarters. The fashion watches were a defined, if strange, period in the watch industry, and it seems that we’re currently in a transitional period between one era and the next. The new one seems to combine the collectability of luxury goods of the current market with the more high-octane designs of a previous generation.
The sharp teeth of the market also have me looking for opportunities to have fun collecting. Last week, I wrote about Summer Watches, and you can think of these as pieces meant for a summer fling. They’re goofy but irrepressibly delightful—the type of piece you could wear a couple of times a month, and definitely the one that will spark the most conversations. So this week I did a deep dive on eBay to find the cheapest and most fun watches I could.
