BUYING EXPERIENCE: TAG Heuer Watch Winder

TAG Heuer Boutique / Bicester Village, 21st February 2020

On numerous occasions over the last few years when it comes near Christmas and my birthday my wife has floated the idea of buying me a watch winder, but to be honest I've never really been that interested. I have four automatic watches, but I only wear them occasionally, so to keep them running all that time in-between seems a little pointless and to my mind all it's really doing is bringing the inevitable service closer. It's a different kettle of fish if you have a watch with a perpetual calendar complication or something like that where allowing the watch to stop means a lot of hassle to reset it, but if like me you just have a day/date to fiddle with then it's not exactly a massive deal to put it right and wind.

So really I was never that bothered, albeit I knew that TAG Heuer watch winders existed... mainly because I had seen photos of (Calibre11 moderator and previous T.H.E. interviewee) Hubert's, but I had no idea where to get one or even if they were on general sale. Even if they were available I (rightly) supposed they would be prohibitively expensive and so as much as I liked the look of them it was something I was resigned to never owning. 

That changed a couple of weeks ago when the Bicester Village store got in this 'ex-display' model, it's in very good condition, but there are a few little marks here and there, mainly on the glass doors. The list price was a fairly ferocious £1260, which as I suspected was quite a bit more than I was willing to part with, but the sale price was a massively more affordable £252.

I must admit I very nearly passed on it, but then I thought better of it and posed the question to my wife if she still wanted to buy me a watch winder for my birthday? The answer was yes and so I took it home and played with it a little bit before removing the batteries and handing it over for safe keeping until October.

Yes indeed, this one is battery operated... which I'm actually quite pleased about because where I want to put it there are no plugs nearby! You can get a mains adaptor for it, but it didn't come with one and I shan't be bothering with that. The batteries sit behind the metal plates you can see in the picture above and are easily accessed with the edge of a coin.

The wind function is easily initiated using the toggle switches just under the watch on the front of the winder. To begin with the winder gives the watch quite a vigorous routine of turning before settling down. Truthfully, I don't really know if I'll ever actually use the winding function; it's actually surprisingly noisy and I'm quite sure my wife will moan about it keeping her awake at night! But still, it looks great and more importantly it frees up two cushions in my ever-filling cabinet and that's quite a bonus moving forward, hehehe...

The only thing I am a little worried about is the watch holders, which seem to be incredibly strongly sprung and I'm a little concerned about the strain it's putting on the strap of my titanium Calibre 16 Carrera. I'm probably worrying unnecessarily, but it does look mighty tight on there... odd really as I have quite big wrists.

Of course it's slightly disappointing that I have to wait seven months to get my hands back on this, but still I'm sure it will be worth the wait, and at least I will have it in time for my end of 2020 State of the Collection post. :)