Grinding Gears: 3 things the next generation is going to do with that heirloom grade timepiece

We get it, honestly we do. You've spent years amassing a collection of incredible timepieces. Watches that do more than tell the time; they encapsulate your soul and your personality. We know that secretly, in your heart of hearts, you have fantasized about how the next generation will receive your legacy. Perhaps on the day of your son's wedding, you will take the watch off your wrist and place it in his hand as an emotional rite of passage. Or maybe, decades on, your descendants will still wear watches once owned by you, and think about how and where that lifetime of patina was acquired. It's a charming fantasy, but it's just that, a fantasy — one sold to you by finely tuned marketing campaigns and enthusiastic sales associates. Here's what will really happen to your collection when you pass it on.

Going Under the Hammer

This might hurt, but the reality is that if your watch collection is of any value, the first thing your family are doing is googling the model name and 'value'. The second thing that's happening is it's being listed for sale. Honestly, the best you can hope for is that they're selling it properly — taking it to an auction house rather than popping a few blurry iPhone photos and a one-line description online. If your kids are lucky, the watches will have appreciated in value since you purchased them, but chances are good that won't be the case, but don't worry, if they sell them, they're probably using the cash to buy something that's actually useful.

Full Factory Service 

In some ways, this potential outcome is even worse than your precious collection being broken up and sold. It's worse because it comes from a good place. Imagine this: you spend years, decades even, finding the perfect collection of vintage timepieces — early examples with perfectly faded dials and original bezels, bracelets that are rattly in the best way possible. Your heirs, uninformed but well-intentioned, are now the custodians of this piece of history. And what do they do? Well, they do something that seems perfectly reasonable but is simultaneously horrific: they service them. Not knowing any better, they drop them off at the authorised dealer, and those old, faded bezels and dials are now shiny service dials while the case is polished to remove all those old scratches. 

The Sock Drawer

The final likely ending for your prized timepieces is simultaneously the best and the worst. They end up forgotten and unworn at the back of the cupboard or pushed to the back of the sock drawer. While it might not have been intentional to hide these watches away, there's plenty of truth to the adage of out of sight, out of mind, and the result is that the meaning behind these timepieces, which were once objects of passion and care, will be lost to time, gathering dust. On the one hand, they will remain as you left them, but on the other hand, no one will care or remember.

So, it's easy to pass it on to the next generation — but will the next generation care?