The hottest question in the watch community: How can I be sure a watch is authentic?
This question is important and not very easy to answer - that's why it's so interesting. How can you tell if the watch you spent 2 months salaries on, is exactly what it claims to be?
In general, if you follow your instincts that should be a good start. If an offer is too good to be true, it probably is “too good to be true”. Even we at VintageCaliber have to invest a lot of time in research and testing to guarantee the watches we are dealing are authentic, and this is our main job!
As a Watch Dealer we get at least 200 % margin on every watch, right? Wrong!
For an outsider, it's not really obvious what goes into running a vintage watch dealership. This is probably the foundation of the common misconception watch dealers are facing sometimes. It may seem as if we are only buying watches, markup the price by 200 % and sell them immediately. That's absolutely not how the business works...
You are a vintage watch dealer? Cool. So what the hell does vintage mean?!
If we are asked, what we define as vintage watch we refer to the following points: It's a wristwatch, between 30 and 100 years old, fine, valuable and collectible.
That narrows it down a bit. But why would anyone would something so old and sometimes even fragile? We made our argument for why we love vintage watches already...