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Roy Davidoff - Time-Tested Passion
1.2k Plays3 months ago
Roy Davidoff is no stranger to the watch community, so I figured it would be great to sit down, and understand more as to why that is. Roy’s love for watches is no accident, having discovered his passion for them early on, eventually making a career out of it. However, luxury things are in Roy’s blood, as his family were prominent wholesale gem dealers several decades ago to some of the biggest names in the game. After Roy’s father gifted him his Omega Speedmaster, his love for the brand took off, earning him and his brother, conveniently named, Davidoff Brother’s, a spot as a go to for the brand. They’ve sold as many as 150 Speedmasters in a year, and even wrote a book on them. They’ve since expanded their inventory across multiple brands and categories, and are still after the good stuff. At the end of the day, it’s all about passion and their roots. So please enjoy, this is Roy Davidoff, for Collectors Gene Radio.
Roy's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/roydavidoff/
Davidoff Brothers - https://www.instagram.com/roydavidoff/
David Brothers Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/davidoffbrothers/?hl=en
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Transcript
Early Fascination with Watches
00:00:00
Speaker
I was a little boy in the mountains and it's my aunt that tells me the story that we're walking through the the city in Carmeltona and that I stopped by a watch store and I basically looked him into the window and I said, I'm going to buy everything.
Welcome to Collector's Gene Radio
00:00:14
Speaker
What's going on everybody and welcome to Collector's Gene Radio. This is all about diving into the nuances of collecting and ultimately finding out whether or not our guests have what we like to call the collector's gene.
00:00:27
Speaker
If you have the time, please subscribe and leave a review. It truly helps. Thanks a bunch for listening, and please enjoy today's guest on Collector's Gene Radio.
Introducing Roy Davidoff
00:00:39
Speaker
Roy Devadoff is no stranger to the watch community, so I figured it would be great to sit down and understand more as to why that is. Roy's love for watches is no accident, having discovered his passion for them early on, eventually making a career out of it. However, luxury things are in Roy's blood, as his family were prominent wholesale gem dealers several decades ago to some of the biggest names in the game.
00:01:00
Speaker
After Roy's father gifted him his Omega Speedmaster, his love for the brand took off, earning him and his brother, conveniently named Davidoff Brothers, a spot as a go-to for the
Success with Omega Speedmasters
00:01:10
Speaker
brand. They've sold as many as 150 Speedmasters in a year and even wrote a book on them. They've since expanded their inventory across multiple brands and categories and are still after the good stuff. At the end of the day, it's all about passion and their roots. So please enjoy. This is Roy Davidoff for Collector's Gene Radio.
00:01:28
Speaker
Roy Davidoff, welcome to Collectors Dream Radio.
Roy's Journey in Watch Collecting
00:01:31
Speaker
Cameron, thank you very much. So anyone in the watch world is going to be familiar with you and your brother, but for those that are collectors of other things, can you give the listeners a brief rundown?
00:01:44
Speaker
So my brother and I started 10 years ago, our company. We we got a running start ah because we've been collectors for for years. I've been buying and selling watches since nineteen 89, I'm going to say, right before and we moved to Miami. um And I've been a fan of watches since the winter of 1980, 81. I was a little boy in the mountains, and it's my aunt that tells me the story that will be walking through the the city in Comontana, and that I stopped by a watch store, and I basically looked into the window and I said, I'm going to buy everything.
00:02:31
Speaker
you know you talk about this story of your aunt. You know seeing you in front of the store and you want to buy everything but. Even without that your father was a collector is not right. So my father wasn't a collector. My father. My grandfather's with the girl and my great grandfather from my father's side.
Family Legacy and Inherited Watches
00:02:53
Speaker
All were jam dealers how interesting.
00:02:56
Speaker
And unfortunately they left no marks because they were all wholesalers to the largest brokers that sold to Cartier. And my dad did a few deals with like Harry Winston directly and other, you know, Lori Graff and other people like this. But this was like decades and decades and decades ago, but they're all like, and they're all like little stories because he, he was able to source for the big dealers.
00:03:26
Speaker
right there's no There's no record of what everything is. People people today, they know what my father did, but there's no like, he didn't have a readout story. He had an office on the eighth floor of the main street in Geneva, a fantastic office where where I remember shares from the Middle East to come with like suitcases with hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm talking about like 40 years ago or 35 years ago.
00:03:54
Speaker
I would come and like just buy a million dollar jewelry sets with like you know Burmese ruby, cashmere sapphires, colored diamonds. And this was like in the 80s. So this is this is what my grandfather and all my family business. I'm a gemologist. I graduated in Carlsbad in 1999.
00:04:19
Speaker
But this isn't what my brother and I started doing because it's like, you know, we we we didn't fall far from the tree, but it's completely different businesses. My my grandfather had an Omega. My father had like an Omega, a quartz two-tone Royal Oak. It wasn't really like a ah watch collector. he he He was, you know, a really high-end jewelry manufacturer and a red gemstone dealer.
00:04:45
Speaker
Well, he must have had some sort of inkling and in the watch world because at age 13, he got you a 1969 Omega Speedmaster. So it was his, it was his watch. Oh, interesting. It was his watch that he bought down on the street. It's a 1969 Mark II racing ah that he got ah from a shop down the street that doesn't exist anymore. That's literally like a three minute walk from my shop would have been. um the same The same day that his father, my grandfather, got his Constellation CKs designed by Genta. I have both watches. I cherish them. I rarely wear them.
00:05:23
Speaker
And the funny story with both these watches is that ah dials have been swapped. One of them, the movement is no longer individual movements, a service movement from the eighties. They're over polished and, you know, exactly what I don't want to buy. um But those are two models that I cherish very much, um including the 1976 Speedmaster mule stock that my brother gave me for my 40th birthday. Amazing.
00:05:51
Speaker
Yeah, so this this is the foray in which my like my mom's, for example, my my mom's nice watches today are all watches my brother and my brother and I have gifted her over the years. I'm sure her her jewelry set up over the years wasn't too bad though. That's ah that's a different discussion. So as you mentioned, the understandable big passion of yours and you know a large part of you and your brother's identity is the Omega Speedmaster.
Passion for Omega Speedmaster
00:06:18
Speaker
You guys even wrote a book on it.
00:06:20
Speaker
had you not received that watch as a gift at age 13, do you think your trajectory in collecting and subsequently the ethos of Davidoff Brothers would be different?
00:06:32
Speaker
I think it would have been because that watch, my brother remembers me wearing it, so then he went out to get the Japan Racing, which was the ah racing radition from 2004. He got it because ah he noticed it, because he noticed mine.
00:06:49
Speaker
and i think that I would have i wouldve still been interested in watches because that watch i would I wore like super rarely. I mean, you know, I used to wear ah ah GMT Pepsi from the late 90s, the Swiss only dial. I used to wear Panerai's. All my friends remember me wearing Panerai's in the late 90s as well.
00:07:10
Speaker
I collected back then new old stock watches. I would find like weird little memo boxes or weird little day dates, ah omegas, all like they had to be like with the the goof the purple goop or the blue goop or whatever. and I collected a lot of those and I kept them. you know I sold some things. I kept some things.
00:07:32
Speaker
And then just the fact that I kept the heirlooms and my brother bought a Speedmaster, we were in line and everything, as I said, a series of lucky moments. I mean, imagine my father had given me a Rolex or whatever, and then ah my brother would have seen me wearing that Rolex and we would have just done Rolexes instead of Omegas. It could have been that. But either way, I believe we would have worked in watches. What is it about the Omega Speedmaster that you love so much from a collecting standpoint?
00:08:00
Speaker
So funny enough, I didn't care so much about Speedmasters when I was working in vintage the first time around in the and the mid-90s and then all the way to the early 2000s. For me, it was all about, you know, really the the sport, the sport divers. This was really my passion, understanding all the sport divers. This was, I love that. I loved all the explorers, the Cousteau, the Calypso teams, all the underwater adventures that people had.
00:08:28
Speaker
even the GMT when it's tied to to Pan Am. All these little details really, this is what I love. And when when my brother and I started, we wanted to also do Rolexes, but if we realized something very early on, is that For $1,500, you could buy manual wine Speedmaster, which was the same that was approved by NASA to be used for all astronauts, which for us was like, this is crazy. This little so nothing mechanical chronograph is one of the most important watches of the 20th century.
00:09:02
Speaker
So we understood that and thanks to people like Chuck Maddox who put together crazy websites in the early days of the internet 1.0 and also ah to our to our friends ah from Moonwatch only and then also we used to have a good relationship with the Omega Museum. We were able to have a good access. For example today, I mean a couple years ago you had a question about a Rolex. You couldn't know if the watch was really delivered to so-and-so country, if it was really born with a blue bezel, if it was really born with so-and-so shield on the dial for so-and-so military. But with Omega, you could, you know, send them an email with some pictures and be like, oh, we have this watch that says PAF. f ah
00:09:45
Speaker
It has a PF on the the on the on the movement. It says Railmaster on the dial. Or, you know, is this correct? Is this not correct? Should it say something else? Or they're like, oh yes, they should say Seamaster because this was delivered to the Pakistani Air Force. And they're like, oh yes, I made a mistake. The picture, I couldn't see what it said, but the picture actually said Seamaster. So it's actually correct. You know, like all these old watches that we would, and actually I have a story about that.
00:10:14
Speaker
Let's hear it. Do you know how watches were sold back in the day when you didn't have attachments you couldn't put in emails? I had no idea. You would photocopy a watch and send it by fax. Makes sense. And people bought $100,000 watches like that. Unbelievable.
00:10:41
Speaker
Imagine, I mean today people like they want like 4K videos, HD quality. Rich shots. Rich shots, they want like macro shots and you used to sell watches from a photocopy that you faxed. And I'm sure it was much easier back then to be honest to send something back had it not been kosher.
00:11:02
Speaker
Nobody cared. You would have, let's say, a fancy lug Vacheron or a Patek Philippe that you sold for like $2,000 to $12,000, whatever it was, and the doubt was redone, but nobody cared.
00:11:17
Speaker
Nobody cared. They just wanted a watch to have a nice watch. the what The dial was all original, but it was like half of it had turned black and people didn't care. They just wanted to have a nice wristwatch on the wrist. It's only in the last 10, 15 years with with the advance of like Instagram and and then the internet that people are like oh my god it has to be like untouched perfect blah blah blah but so i have one quotes that i say everytime someone wants to quote me my quote is condition condition condition.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's it. When i when you buy a watch, that's what it has to be today. But 20 years ago, it didn't make a difference. It had to be like like get like good like a Submariner, whether it was glossy, matte dial or a Radium or whatever, it was like 800 to 1000 bucks.
00:12:10
Speaker
And so when it comes to, you know, that philosophy of condition, condition, condition, is that how you, that's obviously how you approach things that you buy to sell for the business, but is that how you approach things for your personal collection, right? Or do you have, right, we all have some leniency sometimes when it comes to buying something for our personal collection.
00:12:30
Speaker
um I'm going to add something to that. we I was talking to someone, I think it was in January. i was at the I was at a watch show and I looked around and I realized that all of us watch dealers are a little bit crazy.
00:12:47
Speaker
yeah I mean, really, really like a little bit crazy. I'm not going to say like, you know, I'm just going to say most of us are completely OCD in the spectrum. ah we should We should be taking medication for some of the stuff that we have. But the point is is that watches is an outlet.
00:13:09
Speaker
and then For me, for example, i my my brother cares a bit less, but when I get a watch new, if the watch is 15 years old, it will literally look like I got it yesterday.
00:13:22
Speaker
So I am really obsessed about wearing watches with long sleeves to be to be protected. and you know Sometimes I buy watches which are not, so they're like more like daily beaters and I don't really care. But like most sort of the watches that I buy as new ah stay as new for like years and years and years.
00:13:44
Speaker
So for you, when it comes to vintage watches, what makes something truly desirable to you to the point where you have to add it to your collection? Is it based on a specific brand or a dial that you've been looking for? What do you typically search for? So I no longer really buy vintage for me as a collector because I want to be able to wear any of my watches and not have to be able to tell one of my clients, sorry, I'm keeping this one.
00:14:12
Speaker
Right. I don't find that fair because it's like, I don't know, you go to a restaurant and usually you see the chef in the back kitchen eating a sandwich. You don't see him with with the spoon inside the caviar, you know, eating it. He reserves the best cuts for the customer and he doesn't serve himself properly. So I just said, i my brother and I really decided to stay away from from keeping vintage. Sometimes we like I mean, we we lose our mind on a watch like he, he, uh, there was one, uh, two nine and eight, which he was like, fuck you. I'm keeping it exactly.
00:14:52
Speaker
yeah i mean like One watch that he just put on his wrist and he was like, there's just something about it. I just have to keep it. That's why I have a, I have a 76 speed master new old stock. Uh, that's why he has, uh,
00:15:04
Speaker
He has two 83 Speedmasters, both delivered from his birth month. no so I tried to collect new watches just because ah they come with a warranty. I can go swimming with them. and I'm not so worried you know that someone is going to be like, oh, please tell me this watch. And even when during the hike, people were offering me like double what I had paid for my wristwatches. And I was like, no, I'm i'm a collector.
00:15:30
Speaker
i like Iconic watches. I like blue dials. I prefer integrated bracelets if there isn't a weatherman leather. this is the This is who I am. This is what I like. you know i grew up I grew up with like Panerai's Offshores. Those are for me the the coolest watches ever. For me, an Offshore was worth three times more. A regular ah basic Offshore was worth three times more than a 5402. Right.
00:16:01
Speaker
because it was the same base movement, except a beefier case, a quick set date, and a chronograph. And the 50 if it were two was a non-quick date and a flimsy little case.
00:16:16
Speaker
It is interesting how you know more complication or i guess rather more complicated watches sometimes can be cheaper than you know a more dinky version of the old thing. or you know it's just It's kind of interesting how the market reacts to that. We sell perpetual calendars For like, i right now I have a perpetual calendar for under 60,000 Swiss francs and someone in gold with a skeleton and someone will show up with a stupid 5402 that for sure something has been redone, repolished, recut, re-something for the same price. And I'm like, but it makes no sense. Yeah, it's it's it's always interesting.
Modern Brands and Evolving Designs
00:17:00
Speaker
I'm curious to know what modern brands kind of have you captivated right now.
00:17:06
Speaker
i'm ah I'm a sucker for AP these days. For years, as you can hear me, the jumbo I thought was like not a nice watch because of slow date. And for me, that made absolutely no sense.
00:17:18
Speaker
When the Nautilus 3757-11 upgraded the movement, um the 222 was discontinued, but now you have the new one. all the All the iconic watches had better engine put in them. The Daytona went from being manual to automatic.
00:17:37
Speaker
ah The stub went from being you know just an aluminum bezel, or a plexi that's scratchable to a beefier case, ceramic bezel, sapphire crystal. you know All these watches improved, and the 5402 and the 15202 was just like this little dinky watch. And then a few years ago when I got my my offshore,
00:18:01
Speaker
We went to the museum, I tried on what I thought was a 15202 and it turned out to be a 16202 and had the date setting and I was like, shit, now the watch is right. You know, you for me,
00:18:14
Speaker
old design, which is basically today what all brands are kind of doing right, quote unquote, with a brand new technology, better movements and better class and better details is what we should be doing. It's same thing when you buy a Porsche. You don't want to buy a Porsche that looks different from one from 10, 20, 30 years ago. Only the proportions changed.
00:18:39
Speaker
but the overall look is identically the same. Same thing when you buy Mercedes. You buy a Mercedes that's 10 years old or 20 years old, it still looks like a Mercedes in the showroom today. As time goes on, it's obviously no secret that it's really difficult to find something extraordinary, be it because you know access to the internet or auction houses or just the rarity of something truly unknown and unfound coming to the market now after all these years doesn't happen as often.
Thrill of Finding Rare Pieces
00:19:10
Speaker
As someone who's been doing this for a long time, do any stories come to mind when you found something that was just extremely special? A lot of the stories involved Speedmasters. Well, yeah, I mean, new old stock Speedmasters from forever ago are are really rare. So I believe that we have come across the absolute nicest, nicest series of 2,998.
00:19:35
Speaker
We bought them from all across the world. I bought one that came to me in the flat paper FedEx envelope from Veracruz in Mexico. I bought one that we drove to to to to to Germany to pick up ah where we had to pay cash. I found one in in Paris that a collector had picked up for like cheap at an auction.
00:20:00
Speaker
um we we We got some from some collections. We passed on one, but the dial looked weird. And we didn't realize it was like ah it was a rare dial ah that he had picked up years before.
00:20:12
Speaker
because it was just cool, but anyways, we could have paid five times more just for the dial. So Speedmaster, we were able to, have a friend of mine called me once and he's like, dude, I found this watch in Orlando. I paid $3,500 for it. ah What do you think it is? And I get a picture of the watch and I see the case side and I see the case back and I was like, shit, let me check. ah Back then when, you know, it was easier to communicate with the Omega museum.
00:20:40
Speaker
Uh, they're like, uh, don't do anything. Don't tell anyone you have this watch. Let me check. I get a serial number. We check the watch. It takes us like a year. We have to contact Jim Ragan from, uh, from, uh,
00:20:53
Speaker
who was the did all the tests on the Speedmasters back in the 60s to ask, like how come this watch is not that the Smithsonian? What's the story? And we get like ah like a written like a handwritten letter confirming that the watch was not was ah decommissioned ah either in the 80s or the 90s because they was nott it was not flown. It was only used for ground exercises.
00:21:17
Speaker
And basically, ah like a year later, I go to my friend who picked up this watch for $3,500. And he asks like a six digit price tag on the watch. And my brother and I looked at each other, we're like, man okay, fuck it. We have now not watched. So um that was one and then A friend of mine also called me one day. He's like, oh, this watch, I don't know. Last time, ah and like and another astronaut watch came out for auction. um The FBI showed up and everybody freaked out. ah Somebody just brought me this watch. What should I do with it?
00:21:56
Speaker
And I was like, I don't know. Again. museum And they're like, no, this one is a non-issued. It's part of the 60, but there's only, they only delivered like 55 of them. So there's four or five of them floating in the floating in them. I mean, not anymore. They're all in collections.
00:22:13
Speaker
There's a few of them floating around, and so we bought it. And again, we did all of our research, all the due diligence, and we found out that it was, again, not issued because doesn't have the the it has the model number, but not the serial number from NASA. And they're all they're all sequential serial numbers, so it's it is a batch of five that were not just not done. They just made extra watches.
00:22:34
Speaker
And there's even extra dial going around, but that's a different story. um So we have this one and then again, ah some Rolex dealer comes up with like a white Alaska dial and we borrowed it for our exhibition and then we asked him like, but how much is it? And he gave us a price and my brother was like, okay, we'll buy it.
00:22:54
Speaker
you know so like One of the only two correct white alaska dials ever to come up an auction was on the bars. One of the two ah scbs to come up on auctions was on the bars. One of the two radio dials to come up with correct you with the correct nothing removed was on the bars.
Faith in Speedmasters' Value
00:23:15
Speaker
ah We've had some crazy 2-9-1-5, broad arrows, some crazy 2-9-8, some really nice 2-9-13, 2-9-14, military, civilian. we had like ah like I've seen like two in my life, the the ra the sorry the radium skeletonized dial um because it's like ah it's like a telephone dial because the real master normally is Uh, the three, six, nine, 12, but this real master had all 12 numerals. And I was sitting next to, uh, to my friend who's now, uh, my friend while he was in the archives with the micro fish and he was sliding through a micro fish and we find that serial range and you can see that 10 were made and delivered. And that's it. Wow. That's dial with like syringe hands, like the really oddity. Uh, so we had one of those. No, we we've been in in that aspect with omegas have been quite lucky.
00:24:10
Speaker
Tell me about some of these prototype Speedmasters that you see once in a blue moon get posted. They have you know sometimes like a grayish bezel or dial. They're really interesting. So it's a discussion that I that i get very upset about. But the point is is that gray bezels are just faded. And the 60s all the way up to the early 70s, all the way up to I think to 76, I think, you can find those black bezels ah faded.
00:24:39
Speaker
After 1967-68, I would say, mid-68, they would only fade to gray. Before 1968, from 1960-61, they could fade to two different colors of blue. They could fade to green. They could fade to brown. They could fade to gray. ah Gray silver, even some.
00:25:03
Speaker
So in just in terms of bezels, and there's basically like, and you can, and over time you can see like batches, but you can see a bezel and you're like, Oh, it's this year, because you recognize that you've seen like four or five of the watches with the same type of aging.
00:25:19
Speaker
Same way you see premium, the same way you see stuff like this, like also batches of tropical dials. Like a even us, we we sold watches and then we realized that the dial was like two, three years earlier because after it was past that date where the tropical dials still existed. ah Really interesting. So for us, this is, and also, so you asked me about the gray dials.
00:25:44
Speaker
There's like short indexes, long indexes, they're gray, grayish, blue, blue. It's very difficult to to differentiate them and say which one is more correct than the other. But basically, if it's before 1968, it has to have long indexes. And if it's after 1972 or 1970, sorry, 1971, 1972, it can be short index blue dial because that technology of blue dial didn't exist prior to 1971.
00:26:13
Speaker
But regardless, it's a really rare dial. So if you're buying it like the single dials that you find sometimes in ah floating around watches, it's okay. We know the dial was not born in the watch. We know it was either a prototype dial or some some some trial, like they were just trying to do stuff with it. As long as it's disclosed, ah for me, it's perfectly fine, but you have to know, and the buyers usually know. Some of the various people made up stories,
00:26:42
Speaker
But the point is is that they're just red eyes that were not case or were sent to retailers to maybe help them sell their old stock, whatever the story may be. And that's it. At some point in collecting and dealing, it's inevitable that you make the jump into something that you truly believe in, even if the market may disagree. Is there anything that you could think of of a time where you and your brother really believed in something and the market wasn't necessarily there yet, but the risk paid off eventually?
00:27:12
Speaker
but speed masters Yeah. I mean, they they have, they did it really explode. I mean, it's, uh, we bought speedies for like 17,000 that we were like, this is expensive. And then we held onto to it a little bit because we couldn't sell it right away. Uh, and then we sold it for like 35 K and we were like king of the world with double their money, which is like impossible in this world. And then we bought the watch back for 80 K.
00:27:37
Speaker
I mean, for example, i want I bought a watch that a dealer dealer showed me a picture of a watch and I was like, sure, you know, ah what do you want for it? It's like, oh, like 2,600 euros or whatever it was, $2,500. The dollar was more or less euro.
00:27:51
Speaker
And then we realized it's a super rare watch. So we were asking 15 and people were offering us like 12 and then we're like, then the price went up. And then we're asking like 20 people to ask me, offering us like 18. And we still didn't sell the watch. And after like two years of owning it, we finally put it up at auction and the watch sells for like $60,000.
00:28:14
Speaker
It's amazing. It's an all-dollar watch that we paid. So we we believe in the watch. We believe in the product. the watch is still it The watch is worth more today than what it did in this auction. Wow. Speedmasters are really watches that we believed in past tense because unfortunately today the market is a bit more shy. We still have incredibly rare Speedmasters.
Trading and Auction Experiences
00:28:38
Speaker
ah Right now, we have a we we don't show them because we really show them to our to our collector friends, but they're usually not going to show up on the websites or at the same time. But we have like um just every time I open the box, I'm like, holy shit, how lucky are we to have like that many in that condition? Has collecting watches led you down the path of collecting anything else? It has not. Actually, no, it has a little bit. um I always collected books.
00:29:07
Speaker
What kind? ah About watches. I try to collect as many books about watches as possible. A couple years ago, I gave away, I would say, a third of my library just because I was moving and I didn't care anymore. I kept i kept the Patek, the AP, the Vacheron, the Omega, the Cartier.
00:29:29
Speaker
But like, I mean, I wish I had kept the Piaget stuff because there's some pretty cool designs in there, but I have a few that I was able to find again. Breguet I kept also, but I had like...
00:29:42
Speaker
had like GP or like other brands that did like, you know, all this, um like just the noxious amounts of like watch catalogs from the eighties and nineties, uh, early two thousands. And, you know, but I was like, who cares? Like I had like brands that no longer exists. Uh, catalogs are like leaflets.
00:30:04
Speaker
of people who did watches for important watchmakers, but they finally made their brand. i mean I wish I had really, really kept everything, but I didn't have the space. I really enjoy you know the the old catalogs, which sometimes I look through and it's a bit nostalgic because I see like a gold Paul Newman for $25,000. You can also give me a heart attack. Yeah, but it's funny because it's next to like some stupid watch that's also $25,000, that today's $116,000.
00:30:33
Speaker
And I'm like, the poor guy who paid on the wrong watch. Today, those gold Paul Newman's go from like hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Yeah, I mean, that's that's I think a a lot of people's biggest regret is not buying as many of those as possible. Bitcoin, um'm I'm sorry, $300 Bitcoin, today's worth $60. There's not nothing, I mean, unless unless you're Auro Montanari and you found like ah cheapy cardiers in the and a flea market for a couple hundred bucks that are worth today, yeah hundreds of thousands,
00:31:06
Speaker
Bitcoin. There's no regrets. I sold watches for like 15,000 Swiss francs or 20,000 Swiss francs that today are worth like five, six times more. But it's the markets. I sold to a collector, some some very rare GMT for 40K. He put an auction and it went for 150. But again, nope it's the markets. On Speedmasters, this happens rarely because it's like our markets. I mean, there isn't a rare Speedmaster that appears that no one calls us on. right All the watches were not the go-to guys. But again, we don't do Speedmasters as much as we used to. I think one year, we sold like 150 or 170 Speedmasters seventy speed masters wow and i spoke to the director of the boutique at the time. And he's like, I didn't sell them any Speedmasters. Yeah. He's like, can I get a sales job?
00:32:01
Speaker
Roy, let's wrap it up here with the collector's dream rundown. You can answer these based on watches that you buy for your personal collection or for the business or books that you're collecting. Totally up to you. What's the one that got away?
00:32:14
Speaker
I'm not going to say it's the one that got away. I think I was just thinking about the Daytona that I had sold because I need money to like, you know, it was, it was all my money back then, but I was, I had like my collecting budget, but I should have kept it. It was like a new old stock, a 6263, big red. The watch had been worn a handful of times. You could, you could see like, I remember there was like three strikes inside the pinhole where you could read the serial number. That's how many times it had been opened.
00:32:44
Speaker
um the the The watch was absolutely immaculate. The blade, sorry, the top of the blade where the the Rolex logo is had like zero scratches. I mean, my current Rolex is probably more worn than this Daytona. And it was, for me, it was like it was a late 80s. It was just an incredible watch. And I sold it, unfortunately, and it's one watch that still stays in the back of my mind.
00:33:11
Speaker
um Because everything else I've i've been able to to reacquire or I've gone over it. Do you remember what you sold it for? Yeah, like $18,000. Which was a lot back then. It was a lot back then. They were worth like 12 to 15. Yeah, makes sense. How about the on deck circle? So what's something that you're hunting after now?
00:33:37
Speaker
So I am no longer hunting for anything. I remember five, six years ago, I made a stupid list of everything I want and everything that I have. And my wish list was, I'm gonna say like 40 to 50 watches. And my have list was like,
00:34:04
Speaker
five, six watches, which were watches given to me by my father, my grandfather's watch. A watch I got when I was 18, you know, that's pretty much, that was pretty much it. And now my wish list is less than five.
00:34:20
Speaker
And my ad list is 10 times that size. So so but I'm quite happy with my collection, and I'm waiting for like one watch maybe. and And I'm no longer, I mean, I'm no longer, I have to sell one or two watches for every watch that I buy.
00:34:35
Speaker
That's a good way to add some new stuff in there, especially with modern, because modern stuff is and can be a lot more expensive than the vintage stuff, depending on what you're looking for. So it makes sense. And I'm very happy that my my collection, I mean, I had like 25 Speedmasters and I'll have like nine. I love it. How about the Unobtainable? So this is one that is too expensive. It's in a museum, a private collection, complete unobtainium.
00:35:02
Speaker
So circling back to my to my quick internship working for Aurel Bax at Philips, I was able to hold a watch in my hands that belonged to Duke Ellington. It's a Tasty Tandy with split seconds. Oh, wow.
00:35:24
Speaker
It is by far the cleanest watch I've ever held in my hands. I i played with it but during the viewing, and that watch still rattles in my mind. That's one of the reasons why I loved when Jean-Claude Marie relaunched their watches. I was like, ah, this is a little bit of the feeling that I had when I had that watch in my hands, except it's a percent or a tenth of a percent of the value. Right. Do you know where that watch went?
00:35:54
Speaker
that I sleep is in. I can go look at it once in a while. Yeah, it's not too far from me, right? Exactly. It's really like a walk over the hill. The page one rewrite. So if you could collect anything else besides watches, money is no object. What would it be? You know what? If money was no object, the page rewrite will be colored diamonds because I would i wish I would have kept some of the colored diamonds my father used to trade in in the 80s and early 90s because he was buying them for like thousands of dollars a carat and today they're worth hundreds if not millions of dollars a carat. So if I were to go back, I would probably collect those type of gem gem quality ah diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires that he sold you know for fair market value back in the day, but today they're worth like 100 times more or 10, 20, 1,000 times more. Yeah, if you owned all those, you could probably also own all the watches that you want to own.
00:36:50
Speaker
If I found one of them, I could own all the watches. One of them. Exactly. How about the
Influential Collectors and Anonymity
00:36:57
Speaker
goat? Who do you look up to in the collecting world as a great collector? So it's a difficult question because the more you're unknown, the more people are quote unquote after you. So there are a lot of collectors that I really enjoy spending time with.
00:37:15
Speaker
I know I would say dozens of them and one of our one of our clients my brother and I really a dear friend I still remember him he showed up like in a hunting gear with like a shitty suitcase filled with like bottom third watches that he wanted to trade up and um he became over time one of the biggest collectors that we knew. He had a split second Rolex. He's had like every iteration of the of the Bakelite Radium GMT of the James Bond Rolexes. He's had
00:37:55
Speaker
It's like some like some like crazy important Patek Philippe. He's had every iconic reference from every iconic brand. ah he's i mean every Every sale there was like one or two watches from his, or he bought one or two watches ah for ah for himself. I think that his collection still rattles in my mind as well, I would i would say. I cannot name him, but he's ah he's a dear friend to Sasha and I.
00:38:22
Speaker
His collection is really one that I would one day strive to have... not I couldn't have similar because he has different means than we do. But this is the type of a collection that I can see in the future for someone with the unlimited funds. And not when you see people today that are dispatching their collection while telling people that that this is their collection. I don't like that. I prefer people to stay anonymous. Love it. How about The Hunt or The Ownership? Which one do you enjoy more? The Hunt.
00:38:51
Speaker
I'll give you an example. I have a dear friend who was who was ah in the finance world, but he is a phenomenal a photographer. He goes to Africa and he hunts. He hunts like this incredible African animal mammals, land mammals. um He takes amazing pictures, but basically he hunts not for the trophy, he hunts for the picture. So for me, I believe that not the Instagram picture, but basically I love to have owned a watch. I'm very happy to sell it. Like we've owned some crazily rare watches. We help people. I helped a friend of mine acquire and then a legend, one of the five or six knowns, the the gold, the oyster Paul Newman's. So the hunt is more interesting. The ownership, once you own a watch, it's like, whatever. He's owned it, now we can sell it. The hunt is more fun.
00:39:50
Speaker
Makes sense.
Closing Remarks and Future Meetings
00:39:51
Speaker
And most importantly, do you feel that you were born with the collector's gene? 100%. I was born with the collector's gene. I used to collect swatches that were in my budget. Then I went up into, you know, $1,000, $2,000 watches. And then now, you know, it's it's exponential from there. So 100% I was born with the collector's gene.
00:40:14
Speaker
I love it. Roy, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a great pleasure to talk with you. I know you're across the world and last time we saw each other was in New York. So I look forward to doing that again soon. Thank you very much for for your time. Cheers. Take care. Cheers.
00:40:33
Speaker
All right. That does it for this episode. Thank you all for listening to Collector's Gene Radio.