Watches

I’ve been wearing watches since I was a kid, long before I ever thought of it as a “domain.” My first loves were Timexes – I still think a Timex is one of the most honest objects you can buy – plus a run of Seikos and, at one point, a Piaget knock-off I was quietly proud of. Watches were just always on my wrist.

Then I lost the habit, and it cost me. Working from home, surrounded by screens that all tell the time, I stopped wearing a watch – and slowly turned into a not-so-on-time person. When I finally tried a smartwatch to fix that, it made me worse: another buzzing screen, and somehow no more punctual. About seven years ago I was serious enough about watches to consider making them my next thing – the domain to follow hats – and got derailed by exactly that, smartwatches and life. What actually turned it around was small and specific: the day I swapped the smartwatch for a ring, I went straight back to real watches and never looked back. These days it’s Tissot, Orient, several Citizens, a Momentum, and always a couple of Timexes in rotation.

So here’s how I actually think about watches: wear them, don’t vault them. My taste runs to honest, wearable pieces – watches that tell the truth about what they are and don’t ask to be babied. That’s why I’m a Timex person as much as anything: no pretense, just a small machine doing its job on your wrist. The watch I respect is the one you actually wear, not the one that sits in a box appreciating.

Then the everyday enthusiasm turned into a business. With my brother Aaron I started Lamontre Watch Company – a family vintage-watch venture. The collection that anchors it is collector-grade and Rolex-led (I keep those specifics to the business), and my job was to build the whole thing around it: the brand, the site, more than fifty vintage listings, and a full buyer-education knowledge base. Writing that catalog is how I learned the high end from the ground up – that in vintage, the reference number is everything (a wrong Ref destroys trust faster than any other mistake), that provenance and originality decide value (box-and-papers isn’t the same as a full set; a service dial isn’t an original), that Rolex anchors the whole market’s liquidity and trust, and that nickname literacy – Pepsi, Coke, Rootbeer, Bluesy – is just table stakes. My side of it is the market, the merchandising, and the knowledge system; the collection itself is the family’s.

The thing I’m proudest of building into Lamontre is a line we won’t cross: no watch is an investment. When the draft knowledge base drifted into appreciation percentages and “inflation hedge” language, I pulled all of it out and rewrote the whole cluster around present, verifiable fact – what a piece is, not what it might someday be worth. That’s not the industry norm; plenty of sellers lean hard on the investment pitch. But it’s the same instinct that makes me a Timex guy – a watch should be honest about what it is. It’s the William Bernard standard applied to a wrist: earn trust with specifics, never with a projection.

And under all of it is the reason watches get to me at all. I still have my Dad’s Seiko. It’s not for sale and it never will be. A watch is one of the few objects that reliably outlives the person who wore it, which makes you a custodian before you’re ever an owner. That’s the whole of it for me – from a childhood Timex to my father’s Seiko to a Rolex I’ll photograph for the shop but never own: a small, honest machine that keeps time longer than we do.