Issue 194: The Real Stories Behind New-Old-Stock Movements
Understanding the world of NOS - the sourcing, the detective work and the financial risk - with help from Massena LAB, Fears, Andersen Geneve and Struthers
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is very pleased to say this issue won’t contain any mention of prediction markets, mystery boxes or AI-generated Rolex predictions. The run-up to Watches & Wonders always gives us a spell of slightly frenzied reporting, as the exhibiting brands are forbidden from launching new products, and it seems to start earlier every year. Instead I have another piece of ‘proper magazine writing’ for you - twice in a row! What’s happening? - with a 4,000 word essay on the world of new-old-stock. I spoke to some of the nicest people in watches and they helped me lift the lid on a niche that I think is almost completely overlooked. I hope you enjoy it.
If you have been a free subscriber for a while, let me make one of my intermittent impassioned pleas: this really is the kind of thing you will not read elsewhere. Why not click that ‘upgrade’ button and find out what you’ve been missing?
If you are reading this on Friday, I will be at British Watchmakers’ Day tomorrow. Come and say hi - I’ll be the one wearing the branded baseball cap, of course. You can still buy the official TFW hat, and I might just pop a few in my bag for anyone who wants to save on shipping. Otherwise it’d just be nice to say hello!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
NOS
In the right place, those three letters can mean a huge amount to a collector - but even if you are a real veteran it might not be obvious just how much mystery, frustration, patience and sheer luck is concealed behind them.
New-old-stock is one of those phrases that, once you are sufficiently far down the horological rabbit hole, simply trips off the tongue without much interrogation. It will crop up in press releases a few times a year, at least, and while I’m not saying its primary meaning is overlooked - people generally understand what is literally meant - I think it has become a commodified concept, a badge of horological respectability that isn’t as well understood as it could be.
I don’t think anyone’s really at fault here, and I really don’t mean that brands use NOS cynically. As you’ll read, it’s actually one of the few areas of watchmaking in which I think it would be really difficult to cut corners. I just mean that that polite little term, when encountered alongside all the other specifications and poetic descriptions of a new watch, is something that can just glide serenely right through our brains, leaving behind nothing more than a general sense of heritage. Sometimes brands want to talk about the movement, in which case you are usually treated to a few paragraphs about the wonderful attributes of a Valjoux 88 or a Landeron 248 - but often, there are other narratives in the mix, the (accurate) perception being that even with a small-batch limited edition, the movement history might not be the prevailing source of interest for every buyer, and you don’t want to make it sound like they’re actually buying a vintage watch.
What is new-old-stock?
Whenever NOS is discussed in any detail, it is usually very simply framed in terms of the glory bestowed upon a modern brand by working with some of the great movements of watchmaking history. Without a doubt, that is the big draw of using a new-old-stock movement, but there is so much more to the process than the end result. I wanted to understand a bit more about how NOS movements appear in modern watches, so I spoke to four companies that all have recent experience in the area: Andersen Geneve, Fears, Massena Lab and Struthers. What I learned actually led me to respect the practice far more than I ever had, and I think it should be more widely appreciated. The next time you see a vintage movement in a modern watch, you’ll know that at some point along the line, its creator probably went through a huge amount of heartache to get it there1.
