Worst watch mistake I made…

I received quite some comments on my last post about the ‘Tudor mistake’ I made. So I guess here we go.

It was a warm summer evening. My girlfriend and sister threw a party for their birthdays and as always I was discussing watches with my good friend Carlos.

‘Let’s see what’s on Catawiki tonight’ is what I said. So that’s what we did.

After a bit of scrolling I saw this beautiful Tudor Hydronaut (ref. 20010). Like with a lot of things in life this watch also looked much better after the right amount of alcohol.

There were no pictures of the movement and the pictures that were there were quite compressed. Anyway, we thought that it was a good idea to start bidding. So we did.

We were bidding against someone from Romania. At one point I thought ‘this is enough’ but my friend Carlos was like ‘Ah just one more. It’s for your 30th birthday and we (couple of other friends) will also pay a part of the watch!’ So my friend bid one more time and guess what: the minimum was reached. A really happy moment, not gonna lie. We celebrated it with another beer.

This all happened on a Friday evening while the auction ended on Sunday morning.

When I woke up on Saturday reality kicked in and I start analyzing the photos. I saw some really weird damages and scratches I obviously didn’t see the evening before. At this point I wasn’t too happy anymore.

We all know what happened; it was Sunday morning and the watch was mine. I ‘had’ to pay so I did it hoping I would receive the watch in good condition.

On Tuesday UPS rang the doorbell and there it was: my Tudor Hydronaut. No box, no papers, just a watch rolled in bubble wrap. Absolutely not the moment I hoped for but it was time to see what I actually bought. The watch was totally worn out. A couple of things I noticed were: Scratches on the dial (!), weird damages on the case back (looked like someone tried to open it with a screwdriver), a worn out bracelet and a bezel that was polished way too hard.

One thing was for sure, this watch had to return to its previous owner. And of course, I knew I would not receive a new watch, but a lot of the damages were not stated on the auction page and some things were hidden in the pictures. I even received the watch with a different clasp than showed on the pictures.

And here’s something good to know for my fellow Europeans. While I was waiting for my watch to arrive I checked out the auction page again and discovered some really small letters stating: ‘This is a pro seller. EU citizens can make use of the EU consumer rights’. Time to check what that is.

The EU consumer rights states when you buy something online from a company (it doesn’t matter if it is a auction like Catawiki) you have 14 days to return the article without any explanation. This was my chance to get my money back.

In the meantime a friend of mine who is a watchmaker checked the Tudor. And as expected the watch was as worn out on the inside as it was on the outside.

I requested return from Catawiki. First I got a email stating that winning an auction is definitive, but they requested some pictures. After the weekend they emailed me back telling me the ‘expert’ looked into it and thought everything was legit and that they are going to pay the seller.

This made me a bit mad and I replied with the fact that I thanked the expert for looking at the pictures but that it doesn’t change my rights as an EU citizen and I requested for the return address. After that email I received what I asked for.

I returned the watch to the seller’s country and a lot of things went wrong with the logistics and customs resulting to getting my money back a few months later.

Of course I made quite some mistakes myself, I will not deny that. It’s something to learn from but it’s also good to know which rights you have. Catawiki is nothing else than a middle man between the seller and you.

Let me know if you had something similar in the comments so we can learn from each other! ✌🏻