Watches are a thing you wear on your body, after all, and the things that make us like any particular watch are incredibly personal. They involve our subjective taste, which we often have a hard time articulating, and play on our ideas of the past, and nostalgia, connected as they are to history or milestone events in our own lives. The real magic is in the power of getting a bunch of people with the same exceedingly strange interest as yourself in close proximity. Nobody should be surprised that the common bond of carrying the watch collecting gene makes these people particularly agreeable.
RedBar is the biggest one, but around are offshoots and standalones galore, all the rage big cities and out in the suburbs too. I, like many of my friends, had not yet participated. When I started working on this column about being a watch-nerd-in-training, I realized that finding out why I partook of my watch hobby all the rage this lonely way might go a long way toward conquering some of the hurdles holding me back as of enjoying my hobby. Why was I shy of watches? I found a few answers quickly. Laziness, sure. Individual guy narrowed his collection down en route for bring ten — and claimed he left at home. But that was just one story.