Watch Shopping? One Of A Kind Collectible Watches Made In The USA

22.02.2024 - 13:04 / forbes.com

A friend of mine has been shopping for a watch from Switzerland’s most famous brand as a college graduation present for months with no success, as stores are empty—even in Switzerland. Other top luxury brands of mechanical watches have also been disrupted by supply chain issues dating back to the pandemic.

But there is no supply chain in watchmaking quite like the one Vortic Watches relies on. The Colorado-based company has been on my personal watch lover radar for years, but I just got to tour their headquarters and manufacturing facility in Ft. Collins, outside Denver, and it was eye opening. The current facility just opened in 2022, and this intimate experience is offered to anyone, not limited to journalists as some watchmakers are. Also, Ft. Collins is an awesome small city, an amazing weekend getaway and vibrant college town famed for its craft beer, craft distilleries and farm to table cuisine. I’ll be doing an in-depth travel piece on Ft. Collins here at Forbes shortly, but Vortic was impressive enough to warrant its own story, and unlike some other brands they actually have watches you can buy—including an all-new lower priced line, launching shorty.

The Vortic story goes back a century, to the golden age of domestic watch production, in the early to mid-1900s, when several companies in the United States led the world in the manufacture of mechanical pocket watches, often with cases made of precious metals and sometimes bejeweled. These were the watches our grandfathers and great grandfathers got as their graduation gifts, or wedding presents, the watches that kept railroads on time and helped keep American industry chugging along. More than a hundred million watches were produced, and many survive to this day, while others were dismantled so their cases could be sold for gold or silver, leaving the mechanical innards as throwaways many considered worthless. But not R.T. Custer and Tyler Wolfe, classmates at Penn State, who came up with the idea of reviving the domestic mechanical watch industry. After some research, they decided the best way to do this would be to “upcycle” these millions of existing examples of fine craftsmanship, repairing the movements and putting them in new cases to be worn on the wrist.

In the beginning Vortic used 3D printers to craft new cases, but today they do ultra-precise machining and make cases out of titanium or bronzed stainless steel, and you can see the meticulous process in person in Ft. Collins. In a watchmaking lab like those in Switzerland, behind glass and specially sealed and filtered for dust, you can see the watchmakers at their benches restoring the movements, almost of all which are unique, even if they come from the same series once produced by