Worn & Wound
Selling Points that Don’t Sell Me: Spec Snobbery
If I were to make a gross oversimplification of watches, I’d say they are about three things: provenance, design and specs. The first two are relatively straightforward: Who made a watch, and what does it look like? There are endless rabbit holes to go down with each, and fellow enthusiasts welcome anyone looking to join the conversations. That’s good news for those of us that long ago lost the privilege to ramble about Hans Wilsdorf at the dinner table, and have a limited number of times we can say “concentric circles” before our non-watch friends tune out. But in my initial years of collecting, I shied away from conversations of provenance and design, instead favoring talk of specs. Above all else, specs were what sold me. It’s a trend I’ve noticed fellow enthusiasts follow, which makes sense. Specs are tangible. They are indisputable facts on paper that immediately give an idea of how a watch will wear based on its dimensions, what its beat rate will be, how much abuse its crystal can take, and at what unnecessary depth of water it could out-live its wearer. With some welcome influence from my favorite YouTube reviewers, it was easy as a new collector to discern what specs were considered acceptable by the larger enthusiast community. While we may never agree on which case diameter constitutes the ideal “sweet spot” (but we all know it’s 36-38mm) or what movement is best, one specification seemed to have near universal support in the comment sections: ...