Working only for the buyer, from Tokyo

Why this service exists

Japan has the deepest supply of vintage watches in the world, and the least accessible. Watches sold only in Japan, kept carefully by their first owners, serviced by domestic watchmakers and traded in a dense network of small dealers — almost none of it reaches a buyer in Berlin or Boston except through a listing that has already passed through two middlemen and gained forty percent.

Meanwhile a collector who knows exactly which reference they want has no realistic way to search that market. The listings are Japanese. The sellers do not ship abroad. And condition, which is most of the value in a sixty-year-old watch, cannot be judged from three compressed photographs.

So the service is simple: we are the person in Japan who looks at the watch for you, before your money moves.

How we make money — all of it

Every charge is agreed with you in writing before a search starts. We do not:

• take a finder's fee or kickback from any seller, dealer or auction house;
• mark up the price of the watch — you see what the seller is actually paid;
• keep a negotiated discount quietly — where we get the price down we take 25% of the reduction as a stated success fee and you keep 75%;
• earn anything on shipping, insurance or servicing, all charged at cost with receipts.

If we ever hold stock of our own, this page will say so, because at that point our interests would no longer be identical to yours.

Compliance

Every purchase has a documented seller, and a watch with a doubtful chain of ownership never enters the process.

We also decline any brief involving CITES-restricted materials, and we do not under-declare customs value. Both are covered in shipping and import.