Collecting watches is a fun hobby, right? Finding that next piece that speaks to you, searching for that exact combination of style, colour and complications that’ll have you dumbly smiling at your wrist for the next few weeks, months or, hopefully, years. But when you’ve got a little collection going, you need to start asking yourself some questions about where your collection is headed. Is it one and done? Or are you going to be looking at a collection of four, six, ten? When will it stop stop?
Here at Watch Country we fell into all of the cliches. Initially we picked up a six watch box, a cheap and cheerful effort from Amazon. But we were in the grip of new collector syndrome and soon upgraded to an eight. Again, an Amazon effort, mundane but serviceable. Eventually, we settled on a ten and happily filled it with a full compliment of watches. And that was us for a while. Happy with the collection and very happy with the box, it being a step up from the usual Amazon efforts in terms of looks and quality.
Indeed, that box, a Trendhim black leather one, was absolutely superb and had a great feature, their “iconic curved display window” which gave you great visibility of your collection as the box sat on a shelf. But watch collecting is a fickle, changeable thing and we weren’t done falling into the traps of watch collecting. We eventually realised that ten watches is maybe a few too many and that certain pieces just weren’t getting the wrist time they deserved. Oh, man. We’re going to back to six aren’t we?
And actually, that move has yielded the results we hoped for. It’s a manageable number that affords each piece more consideration, more time on the wrist and it’s made us a lot more choosey about new watch purchases. The scattergun approach to collecting has gone and instead every watch that catches our eye has to earn its place now. If anything, it certainly makes the hobby more affordable.
But, we can’t go back to that six watch box that we started with. And so, it was time to find a successor to the mighty Trendhim box and that wasn’t going to be easy. It can take us three weeks of research to buy a new beard trimmer and so this was going to be absolutely exhausting.
We looked everywhere. Amazon and Etsy are the obvious places to start but they weren’t the one. We even looked at eBay. Eesh. Trendhim don’t do a six slot version of their box (they do a five but, you know, come on) and their six slot box doesn’t have a glass lid. Which is, of course, utterly insane.
Eventually though we found Transform. Started by two brothers, Ollie and Joe, this brand is all about watch storage and not much else. Perfect. They’re also based in the UK rather than Shenzhen, which gives you a little extra confidence.
Their main line of watch boxes is the LDN series and this comes in two, three, four and six slot variants. We were specifically looking for a 6×1 configuration and so the LDN VI was the one that ultimately caught our eye. Also, I’m Londoner who’s been living in the North-West of England for half my life and so anything that makes me think of London is good (apart from Chelsea FC or the band Florence and the Machine).
You have to understand, finding the right box is a whole thing. The window needed to be large enough that all six watches were properly visible and we didn’t want some sort of faffy clasp nonsense or, worse, a shitty padlock. Just give us a large enough opening for us to get our fingers in and open the thing. And so, the LDN VI was the one we kept coming back to and now it has arrived.
The immediate impressions were pretty good. Firstly, it was packaged up so securely that you could probably use the whole thing as a rugby ball without damaging the box. We’re good for bubble wrap for our next year’s worth of eBay sales too.
The box itself comes wrapped (nicely) in paper and is delivered in a branded cardboard box. It feels a bit more special than the stuff you get on Amazon, which is fair enough as this is a more premium product and a more premium price (£89 in the UK). You can also pay for personalisation in the form of glass etching which will set you back a further twenty pounds.
The finish on the wood is smooth, sleek and immaculate. Just gorgeous. Cheaper boxes tend to have a heavy lacquer finish to them but this feels much nicer. We shouldn’t use the word sleek twice in a paragraph but this box quietly screams it. The handmade construction and the matte finish. Ooh-la-la. And the window seems to be actual glass, rather than some sort of plastic/acrylic, which has the immediate effect of looking beautifully clear. The size of the window is spot on too. We do miss the curved glass of the Trendhim but we’re getting superb visibility here.
Another sign of quality is in the hinge mechanism which seems delightfully over-engineered compared to the cheaper alternatives. It’s a lovely bit of extra detail when you open the box and the closing mechanism is aided by a gentle magnetism that makes things feel a little bit more secure. It’s not exactly needed but that’s kind of why it is needed. Because it’s just nice.
Transform offer this box up in four colour combinations. All of them a black on the outside but the inner lining and pillows can be grey or black. We’ve got the grey lining with black pillows and it looks great. The pillows themselves support a wide range of wrist sizes and have been manufactured to precisely fit the box, so much so that there’s really no movement unless you manually push and pull them. Your watches are very safe here.
And so, we’re very happy with LDN VI but there are a couple of minor, but unfortunate, niggles too. Given how nicely presented and well-engineered it all is, we were disappointed with one thing in particular. The corners of the inside of the lid have small circles of felt glued on, just to soften any noise when you close the box and these have been applied surprisingly carelessly. One of them was so far forward that you could actually see it when the box was closed. We ended up peeling it off which made that issue go away but you can still see where it was. It’s a small thing but when there’s all this talk of handmade craftmanship, something like that makes you feel like some guy in a factory did the finishing. It’s not a big thing but these lapses are so common with anything we buy from watches to guitars to tech, that it does annoy us maybe more than it should whenever it happens.
The other thing was that there was quite a bit of dust and a human hair in there when we first opened up the box. Again, not a big deal. It’s not a salad. But it takes away from that feeling of a truly quality product and is the sort of thing that Transform maybe need to keep an eye on.
But, we’re not looking to leave this review on a negative note as this is a lovely box and one that we’re very happy with. It’s not just secured itself as the long-term home for the collection but it’s helped assure us that a six watch collection is the way to go. And, more than that, it’s impressive enough that we’re no longer feeling anxiety about not using the Trendhim box.
