Watchlords

Allen Hsieh became mesmerized by watches while growing up in Taichung, an industrial center on the western coast of Taiwan. “They seemed to me like little machines inside of very small cases,” he recalled.


Mr. Hsieh, now 36, has always been familiar with machinery. His father owns a company whose products range from musical instruments to plastics. The younger Mr. Hsieh now manages the business.

Initially, he was intrigued by gifts of Swatches, including a much-coveted Olympic series that he said, regretfully, “I’ve lost.” But then his father, a watch aficionado himself, gave Mr. Hsieh a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso when he was 13 and about to head to Australia for school. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “There were no batteries inside it. You just had to wind it. It was like magic to me.”

Mr. Hsieh said he became so enamored of mechanical watches, especially from the top houses, that “I started collecting books so I could study them.”


During high school and college, he “worked in a friend’s restaurant and in a tax-free shop to get the money to buy watches,” he said, “and that took a long time.” But he managed to buy a Panerai and an IWC 3703 GST Titanium Chronograph. The IWC “was a beautiful color and there weren’t many titanium watches back then,” he said.

When Mr. Hsieh finished school, about 10 years ago, he spent two years in Japan to learn the language and one year in Thailand. He then returned to Taichung to start working in the family business, and that is when he really started collecting watches.


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