FEATURE: Trying to Send A Watch to Sweden..

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A couple of weeks ago Mr Jim Dollares (previous T.H.E. interviewee and Calibre 11 Forum member) contacted me to ask if I would be willing to purchase a watch on his behalf from Bicester Village and then send it to him in Sweden? Since Jim has been a long standing supporter of my blog and I've conversed with him for a good few years now I was more than happy to oblige, but I knew that there would be practical difficulties to overcome.

The first one was getting the money to me in the first place, well... not so much getting it to me, but how much it would cost to get it to me. In the end this turned out to be not such a big problem; Jim paid the money directly in to my bank account - of course this is not something you would ordinarily do unless you trust someone implicitly since you have no comeback at all if the other person decides to screw you over! Indeed, once I had the money I did joke that I would now shut down my blog and disappear forever, and one of Jim's friends did question the wisdom of sending over £2000 to 'some guy' in the UK he'd never actually met... on the face of it, it does sound a little crazy, huh?

As far as cost goes it actually wasn't too bad, Jim reckons it cost about £10 in fees which seems very reasonable to me, and much less than I expected it to cost him. 

The next issue though was how was I going to get the watch to him, and before we got carried away I said to Jim that I needed to visit the Post Office and check what the score was there; because honestly I thought the cost might be prohibitive and/or enough to make Jim think again. So I visited a local Post Office and told them that I wanted to send a watch valued at £2500 (erring on the side of caution) to Sweden, gave them a rough size of parcel and estimated the weight as between one and two kilogrammes.

They told me that Royal Mail didn't have anything but that Parcel Force could do it and that it would cost £160. I reported this back to Jim, who winced a little, but given the huge saving he was making on the watch itself, it was still well worth it, so he decided to carry on regardless.

Initially Jim wanted the brown Heuer 01 Skeleton dial, but then he changed his mind and plumped instead for the solid dial titanium model on the rubber strap. Jim had some trouble getting the money to go through at first, but after a few days it arrived with me and I made a trip over to Bicester to pick up the watch. So far so good; the watch looked great and I got Jim a bonus TAG Heuer pen and we were all ready to roll the next day.

So the next day I rocked up at the same Post Office and suddenly they decide that the service they had offered me had an exclusion for watches and all they could offer me was to send the watch uninsured for £15. Yeah right, who the hell is going to take a risk like that? Certainly not I and I'm sure Jim wouldn't have wanted to either.

So, absolutely fuming that my diligence had come to nothing, I set about finding an alternative; I looked at a company I've used at work before called CSM, but they didn't seem like a good choice as their attitude seems to be 'everything is sent at your own risk'. I emailed a company on the internet called 'International Parcel Co' or something like that and they told me that they have a £250 limit on watches, and I tried UPS who told me that it was 'no problem' and that all I needed to do was declare a value on the parcel. Terrific. So I started filling in the online form to get the ball rolling and discovered that, actually... UPS will not insure any watches over $500 in value.

Back to square one. So finally I tried DHL, who were extremely helpful and who told me that they did have a limit on watches but that it was a much more reasonable 5000Euros (£4200), they also arranged everything quickly over the phone and emailed me a link to their website to finish filling in the dispatch label which I then printed out and attached to the parcel.

The only slightly annoying thing was that I had to re-open the parcel to show the DHL driver who collected it what was inside, but it wasn't a major issue and best of all DHL's price was £40 less than the useless Parcel Force offer. So, to cut a long story short; if you are in the UK and you ever want to send a watch (under £4200) to another country, I suggest you give DHL a call, because I found the whole thing very easy and trouble free and I can't tell you what a relief it was to get that watch off my hands and off on it's travels. I really was beginning to think I was going to have to take the watch back and ask for a refund!

It's a lovely watch, but I didn't barely dare get it out of the box for fear of something happening to it while I was in possession of it, pictures 2, 5 and 6 were posted on Calibre 11 by Jim himself on the day he received the watch.

I of course offered to send the balance of the money back to Jim via Paypal, but he told me to keep it for my trouble and spend it on something watch related, which was very decent of him and much appreciated... and needless to say I've already spent it! :)