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When it comes to taking proper care of a fine watch, you really can’t trust your timepiece to just anyone. You might think that living in a suburb like Littleton, CO gives you unlimited options for watch repair, but the reality is that fixing a watch is like making Felix Felicis in the Harry Potter series: desperately tricky to fix and disastrous should you get it wrong.
Why? It’s because when it’s made properly, a fine watch is an incredible piece of mechanical work. Your watch is made up of several small parts that allow it to function properly, and if you hand your watch to the wrong watch repair person, all it takes is one mistake to make your beautiful watch into an expensive paperweight.
When you spend the money to get a top-quality watch, you should make sure that it’s serviced by experts who know what they’re doing. The right repair team will be meticulous, detail-oriented and knowledgeable about the problems your watch is having, the most likely cause and what they need to do to fix it properly. Fortunately, when you enter a watchmaker’s shop, there are a few signs you can look for to make sure you’re at the right place, and these are some of the best!
Cleanliness
Cleanliness should be at the top of the list when it comes to selecting a watch repair shop. Think about this scenario for a moment. When you go to a place like Ocean Prime, you expect a perfectly set table, clean silverware and an impeccable tablecloth. It’s because they’re proud of the work they do on your meal, and they want to show off their work.
A quality watch repair shop operates under that same principle, except even more so. That’s because even the smallest bit of dust can interfere with the mechanics of your watch if it gets inside of it, and a quality repair person will pride themselves on top-quality repairs each and every time. Plus, cleanliness is a sign that your watch will be treated with the utmost care from the moment that it enters the shop until the moment it leaves on your wrist. A store that specializes in fixing watches will want to make it clear that no stray dust will interfere with your repair.
Watchmaker Authorization
If cleanliness is at the top of the list when you search for a watch repair team watchmaker authorization is a close second. In fact, you can think of these as 1 and 1A, because they’re both important to showing that you can trust the team that’s fixing your watch.
That’s because fine watch makers like Cartier, Phillip Stein and Tag Heuer want to make sure their products are only repaired by the best of the best. These brands are built on luxury and performance, and a Cartier that hasn’t been repaired properly isn’t going to impress any potential new customers, nor will it create repeat customers. Luxury watchmakers have incredibly high standards, and they’re only going to give their approval to watch repair teams that meet those standards each and every time.
For that reason, it’s important to make sure that you find a repair team that’s authorized to work on your watch. When you bring your watch to such a team, you can trust that the watchmaker has studied that shop’s practices and deemed them worthy of meeting their own standards. Short of flying to their headquarters for repairs, it doesn’t get more trustworthy than that.
Reasonable Prices
Unfortunately, fixing a watch is often an expensive procedure, and it sometimes takes a large budget to get a repair done properly. That’s because when you get a watch repaired, you’re paying for the care and process of fixing it properly.
Of course you can find a watch repair service for around $100 for everything, but chances are that you’re going to pay a lot more than that in the long run. When you use a discount service, you’re usually going to get a rushed project that wasn’t approved by the watchmaker. When you get it back, you might find it works well, but more likely, you’re going to run into future problems rather quickly…or it might not work the same way it did before the repairs.
When the time comes for you to get a watch fixed you can expect to spend around 20 percent of the value of the watch on a full service repair job. If your repair estimate costs significantly less or more than that, it’s probably best to keep looking for someone who won’t damage your watch.
Honest, Transparent and Methodical
Unless it’s a really basic fix, a watch repair shouldn’t be completed on the same day that you brought it to the repair team. It takes time to carefully open up a watch and make sure that the repair team understands the damage and can carefully offer a fix for the problem.
Because a watch takes undivided attention to repair properly, it’s a time-consuming process that can take multiple days. If your watch shop says that it can be done in two hours, it’s either a fix you could do yourself or it means that the watch repair team is experiencing a slow day and has the time to focus entirely on your watch.
Barring extenuating circumstances, though, this is a sign that you should probably look for a different watch shop. A shop that doesn’t have anyone waiting ahead of you is probably devoid of customers for a reason, and the reason isn’t likely to be anything good for your watch.
At Matheu’s Fine Watches, we understand that watch repair is not a quick process. We know that it takes time to get inside your watch, find the problem and find a long-term fix for the issue. If your watch has stopped ticking, we’re available in Littleton, CO to provide a fix; call us and bring your watch in for repairs!
