What happened to the Watch Hunter Blog in December 2017?
For regular readers of the Watch Hunter blog, it might seem that December was a quiet month. Where I had been averaging one article per week for much of the year, in December it looked like the site went silent. Maybe you thought I was taking time off to spend with my family or traveling for the holidays. While some of that is true, that does not mean that I was not busy on the site. In fact, I was swimming againstย a giant riptide of research and data collection. Let me explain.
Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier
In late November 2017, I decided to make it my personal quest to find and catalog every Victorinox Swiss Army watch that was ever produced. My plan was to create an online database with basic information and photos of the watch families and styles made by Swiss Army. Little did I realize that this would be like drinking from Lake Basel with a straw. When I launched the Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Tool, I started out with roughly 800 model numbers and maybe a handful of model families. I sourced this starter list from the Reflections of Infinity website that sells replacement watch bands for Swiss Army watches. I will be eternally grateful for Colin’s contribution to my online Swiss Army identifier Tool. Thanks, Colin!
As I have mentioned before, the Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Toolย was something that I wanted to make for myself and others to bring a greater awareness of the murky back-catalog of Swiss Army watches. I cannot stress enough that Victorinox has made interesting watches since their watchmaking start in 1989. If you are only looking at modern Swiss Army watch offerings, you might be missing out on getting great watches with unique designs at an affordable price. Vintage watch collecting is a trend that is not going away and exploring older Swiss Army designs is a way to add some flavor to your collection.
Victorinox Swiss Army surely has an internal list of every watch that they have ever manufactured, but that is not information that they are going to share with the general public or a watch blogger. Some dealers confirmed to me that they do not even have a complete list of SKUs so if I wanted a list, I was going to have to make one myself. This turned out to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. It was only by researching watch forums, analyzing thousands of eBay auctions and utilizing vintage websites (that had not been updated in 10 years or more) that I was able to fill in a lot of gaps, and perhaps open some new ones. Those various online sources had Swiss Army model numbers that I was notย familiar with, and in some cases, there were watches that I have never heard of before. Have you ever heard of a Swiss Army Headquarters or Northwind? Nah, me neither.
Northwind Watch
I also relied on my own memory of Swiss Army watches that I had seen in the past. If I did not see them on my list, I actively hunted them down. This would often lead to unpredictable discoveries of other previously unknown watches to add. That is why there are now 16 watch families (and counting) on the list. This does not include the subgroups, specialty watches or other classifications available within the tool.
At the time of this article in January 2018, my master database is on version 28. As of today, there are over 1200 individual models in my database, but that number is deceptively low. This is because the North American models with SKUs starting with 24xxx or 241xxx often had a European twin with a different model number starting with V.25xxx or V.251xxx. There are over 250 of those listed as aliases, but I guarantee that the number is much larger.
The rare Headquarters watch
The Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Toolย represents my latest understanding of the Victorinox Swiss Army watch product line and family tree. That is not to say that it won’t change in the future. In fact, the reason that there have been so many versions is because one cannot believe everything on the internet. Much of the information that I found had to be tweaked, corrected and refined. Sellers and collectors seem to sometimes be confused about the watch they have. They may list it incorrectly or give facts about it that are simply not true. For instance, I remember reading an eBay auction where the seller listed a Swiss Army watch as a vintage diver from the 1960s, even though Swiss Army was only making knives back then. There is almost as much misinformation as there is correct information on the web.
Additional effort was made to split the hundreds of watches contained within the Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Toolย into subgroups, much like a biologist might do. Creating a family tree of styles can be helpful when trying to identify a watch within a family subgroup. For instance, the Swiss Army Maverick watch family currently has 108 watches. This would be too much to sort through and see any kind of pattern.
Subgroups of the Swiss Army Maverick family
By breaking the collection into subgroups, one can start to see the design DNA that makes up each group. This also helps the user to see the evolutionary changes in design that distinguish one generation from the next as you can see in the 3 generations of Maverick shown below.
Maverick – Generation 1
Maverick – Generation 2
Maverick – Generation 3
My hope is that the Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Toolย will become a place of reference for Swiss Army watch collectors. Other brands like Seiko have whole sites dedicated to the thousands of models that they have produced. Seiko fanboys can spew long lists of numbers that represent a specific watch, so why not have a tool like this available for Swiss Army watch fans? So far, I think it is working because the traffic to my site has shot up at an alarming rate. The interest is there and that makes me glad that I spent at least 60 hours working on theย Victorinox Swiss Army Watch Identifier Tool. If others are using it, that makes it worth the time investment to me. I invite you to participate in expanding the Swiss Army watch database. If you notice that a watch is missing from my list, let me know and I will add it.ย Enjoy and share it with your watch friends.
