Always Trust The Dealer, Not The Watch

A counterfeit dial is a manufacturing problem. A redialled original is a disclosure problem. The first can be caught with a loupe. The second is caught only by someone who has handled enough of the reference to know what the printing should look like when it is right.

That is the whole argument behind the mantra. The object in front of you is mute. It cannot tell you whether the case has been polished past its chamfers, whether the movement was serviced by the manufacture or by whoever was cheapest, whether the papers belong to it or to a watch that no longer exists.

Provenance is a chain of people. When a piece changes hands four times through four sellers who each described it slightly more generously than the last, the watch ends up carrying a biography it never earned.

The questions worth asking are boring ones. Who did you buy it from. What did you open. What did you replace. What would you disclose if I did not ask. A dealer who cannot answer those quickly is telling you something.

We have traded more than ten thousand watches since 2013. The pieces we regret are never the ones where we said too much.