A Travel Winder that Doesn’t Cost $600 – The Perfect Small Gift for Watch Collectors in Your Life – Or For Yourself
I do a lot of travelling, usually a mix of business and leisure. For a typical one to two week trip, I like to have two to three watches with me. I can explain the utility of it all to my wife (a dress watch for going out, a GMT, a sport watch, you know the mix), but what I can’t explain to her is the minor annoyance of keeping them all wound – most of my watches have 36-42 hour power reserves.
While the Boxy winders that we use in our BlumSafes are small enough to take on a trip, I don’t love dealing with another power adapter. So I looked around for battery operated travel winders, but found only one – for $600. I started BlumSafe because I couldn’t brook paying $10,000 or much more for a Chinese-made watch safe, and I wasn’t going to pay $600 for a travel winder either, even a very nice one. I wanted something functional to throw into my hotel room safe and keep my watches wound – I didn’t need to pay for a piece of art.
Anyway, our new travel winder checks all my boxes – a whisper-quiet Mabuchi motor, AA battery-operated, as well as a charging port for an included USB power adapter connection (if you so desire—some hotel safes even now have USB power connections inside). It has two winding settings, both 4 minutes on/26 minutes off at about 1500 turns a day, one setting just rotates clockwise, the other alternates in each cycle clockwise and counterclockwise. I have tried it on my Rolexes, and various ETA movement watches, and it near silently has done the trick. After a month of continuous operation, the same pair of Duracells continues to wind my heavy Sinn diver. It has two different watch cushions, one plastic and one sponge, for different weight and size watches, has an exterior finish of P.U. vegetarian leather in an alligator style (black or brown), a nice window through which to see your watch, a zipper enclosure, and a reasonable form factor – a cylinder shape 3.78” in diameter by 7.3” long, and about 1.75 pounds in weight. It’s all pretty straightforward, whether I am throwing it into my carry-on or my checked luggage (in the latter case, remembering not to leave a watch in it!).
So there you have it. The perfect, functional yet inexpensive gift for a watch collector who travels. You can find it on our website, for only $79, along with our variety of one to three watch travel cases (also good for necklaces and bracelets, of course). This is an easy decision for watch collectors everywhere.
Just do it – or better yet, send this link to a friend to get one for you!
Rob Blum