When was this colour combo considered a good idea?
Discussion
I like to.
ETA that pic doesn't really do it justice and when I first saw them I wasn't impressed however a few guys over on the Rolex Forums have this one and their pictures look a lot better.
Wasn't this one of the models Tom Selleck wore in the latter Magnum PI's?
ETA that pic doesn't really do it justice and when I first saw them I wasn't impressed however a few guys over on the Rolex Forums have this one and their pictures look a lot better.
Wasn't this one of the models Tom Selleck wore in the latter Magnum PI's?
Edited by Miguel Alvarez on Tuesday 18th February 08:56
yeti said:
The green is much more 'in-your-face, pauper' than the black one.
I like it
Yes, it's for people who consider a yellow Gold Rolex just a tad TOOO subtle with a black dial I like it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Kum8OUTuk
M.
Edited by marcosgt on Tuesday 18th February 12:04
Eleven said:
It reminds me a bit of the Krug Baumen Oceanmaster, which I used to sell to supplement my income when I was at University.
Awesome. My mate bought two of these in motorways service stations back in the day, they were god-awful. What was the story there, where were you getting them and at what money? Genuinely curious yeti said:
Eleven said:
It reminds me a bit of the Krug Baumen Oceanmaster, which I used to sell to supplement my income when I was at University.
Awesome. My mate bought two of these in motorways service stations back in the day, they were god-awful. What was the story there, where were you getting them and at what money? Genuinely curious It all started one day on my return home from University for Easter holiday, this would have been in 1995. I'd bought myself a burger at South Mimms services and was eating it outside in the car park. As I tucked in, I casually observed a well-dressed black man (whom I'd later come to know as African Sam) checking the oil level on his 328i BMW. He was wearing grey suit trousers, a floral tie and crisp white shirt rolled up to the elbow. There was nothing unusual about this perhaps, other than the fact that he was dipping his engine oil repeatedly over the course of twenty minutes, whilst keeping a good eye out for people passing by.
Every so often he would abandon his oil checking, stop someone and show them his wrist. Once or twice this was followed by him going to the boot of his car and fetching something which he apparently then sold to the passer by, judging by the activity between them.
I wandered over.
I had already twigged that this was some sort of hooky situation so I greeted Sam with, "whatever it is you're selling I cannot afford it, but I'd welcome a chat". And chat is what we did.
At first Sam regaled me with a tale of his return from a home exhibition in Birmingham and how he had a few watch samples to sell cheaply. However when this story obviously didn't wash he smiled, said something about needing to pay the bills, made his excuses and went back to checking his oil for the umpteenth time.
By the time I was returning to Uni after the holiday I had forgotten about Sam and his enthusiasm for oil levels and again stopped at South Mimms for food. This time I was approached by an Iranian looking man in a scruffy Nissan who drove slowly past me and through the open driver’s window engaged me in conversation about watches. I grinned and asked him if he worked for the black chap with oily fingers. He laughed, "You mean Sam. No, I don't work for him but he is a legend. Everyone knows Sam".
With the ice broken, the Iranian and I chatted and I asked him how the wheeze worked. He explained that he could buy the watches very cheaply, he had an in-flight magazine showing them advertised for £700 and he would sell them to punters for up to £600. Sam, he told me, was the master, and everyone else a bit player by comparison. An impoverished student as I then was, I asked how I too might become a small part of the operation.
And so, a week later, I met the Iranian just north of South Mimms, handed over £450 of my student grant for a small box of watches and then made my way back up north to begin my life as a purveyor of apparently good value if in reality not particularly high quality timepieces.
Now I should point out that although these watches were unquestionably cheaply made, they were not actually dreadful. There were several dress watches in the range, one or two ladies designs too. However, the best seller, the Oceanmaster Gents, aped the Tag Heuer SEL of the era and the "gold" embellishment on the bezel and bracelet looked quite smart in an era that still fondly remembered the 1980s. The watches also came in a bottle green hinged box, not dissimilar to a Rolex. At £600 they would have been a rip-off, but at the £60 I sold them for they were pretty good value (a friend had one a good ten years before it looked too tired to wear).
Over the next year I sold a steady stream of Oceanmasters to anyone who’d have one. I wore one myself and my pitch usually involved allowing someone who’d noticed it to try it on for size. I then offered to obtain one for them. My brass neck never extended as far as bringing out the in-flight brochure.
And then one day just before the end of a Uni semester I received a call from the Iranian. He was going on holiday and wanted to shift some stock; he would do me a good deal on a bulk purchase. So, armed with my student loan I made my way south to re-stock.
The deal with the Iranian went fairly smoothly, albeit that the number of Oceanmasters was less than I’d been led to believe and the “gold” dress watches made up more of the deal. I was, however, paying in the order of £25 per unit so I wasn’t entirely bothered. I loaded the watches into my car and bade farewell to the Iranian, for what turned out to be the last time, and continued south.
Back then I was temporarily living with my parents, because I’d needed to rent out my house in order to afford University. Theirs was a small and uninspiring house in a small and equally uninspiring dormitory town. There was very little to do within a 30-mile radius so I spent a fair amount of time at the only gym locally. It was a spit and sawdust affair and home to some unusually large men whose income seemed to derive from managing nightclub doors and ensuring that night time revellers never ran out of chemicals to keep them dancing. They were a good-natured bunch and over time we became friendly. It was, however, a friendship that would soon be tested.
Being at home for holidays was significantly more expensive than being at Uni. There were many reasons for this, most revolving around not having access to student events and trying to spend as much time away from my parents as possible. I was running out of money on account of my stock purchase and it was nearly a month until I returned to Uni. I needed somehow to convert watches into cash, and fast. It was at this point that I fortuitously, or so I thought at the time, met the man that actually owned the gym. He introduced himself as Mike. He was a charismatic character and easy to like, but the most outstanding thing about Mike was his size. He was absolutely massive and it was the sort of massive that genetics had little to do with.
On maybe the second or third occasion that I bumped into Mike at the gym I was using the squat rack and as I finished a set Mike commented upon my very smart sports watch. I took it off and gave it to him, and whilst it would never have fitted his tree-trunk arms he was clearly smitten. I offered, as I always did in such situations, to obtain one for him. Mike however, being a businessman, was more interested in volume. And there, it appeared, was the solution to my financial woes.
The following day I met up with Mike and sold him my entire stock of Krug Baumen watches. This was quite a number. He negotiated hard but, in consideration of the fact that he was prepared to take the lot, I allowed him a significantly discounted price of £65 per unit. He was pleased with the deal. I was again solvent.
The holidays were drawing to a close and the following week I was due to return to Uni. On account of my frequent gym use I had gained a satisfying degree of bulk and, due to my watch sales, so had my savings. The new term looked promising.
With only a day or so before my drive north I dropped by the gym for workout, as I had done numerous times over the preceding weeks. No sooner had I arrived than I was met by Mike. Actually, met wasn’t the right description, grabbed might better have described what happened. But this was not the usual, light-hearted Mike always ready with a joke, this was an altogether angrier, incandescent and as a consequence less appealing Mike.
As I had perhaps suspected, Mike was something of a king pin in the night time economy of the area and it turned out that he had distributed the watches he’d bought from me to the doors of a number of nightclubs, courtesy of his doormen. He had applied his mark-up, allowed them to take them “on bail” (that is to say they paid him as they sold the goods) and had sat back waiting for pay day. It was a pay day, however, that was never to come. The problem being that whilst Mike had clearly never visited South Mimms, it transpired that a great many club-goers had, and if they didn’t already own a Krug Baumen watch they had been offered one for significantly less than Mike’s doormen were trying to achieve.
It is fair to say that I had ceased to be on good terms with Mike. But whilst he was clearly livid about what had happened, he was man enough to accept that his loss of face and, for that matter, money had been a construct of his own business decisions and not directly because I had fleeced him. Business was, he said, business. He did however wish me a very happy return to University in such a way as to make it clear I probably should not return to his gym, and if I had been left in any doubt at all his parting handshake was sufficiently firm to reinforce his message.
And so it seemed that the market for Krug Baumen watches was, at least at that time, becoming saturated. I had been finding it more difficult to sell them myself and Mike’s experience told me that now was the time to look for an alternative source of income. So, barely a year after I had begun my career as a watch entrepreneur, I found myself looking for a new part-time career.
Great story. Gassing Station | Watches | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff