In our business, we only see tiny quantities of pre-1920 vintage Tiffany watches each year, but with increasing difficulty, we can usually offer a handful of art deco models dating from the years between 1920 and the outbreak of World War II. In fact, Tiffany & Co was the last retailer for which Rolex produced double signed dials before finally ending the practice in the mid-1970s.Īlways very much at the forefront of fashion, Tiffany & Co was an early adopter of the wristwatch for male use in the immediate post-World War I period. It isn’t uncommon to find the Tiffany & Co signature added to dials alongside that of Longines, Omega, LeCoultre and Rolex.
Tiffany was a stockist of almost all the major Swiss brands in its shops and inevitably a strong bond developed with these houses. Patek-Philippe, Movado, Audemars-Piguet, Longines and Tavannes movements, among several others, are all to be found in vintage Tiffany watches from the inter-war period. Tiffany sold watches with its prestigious name stated on their dials, but these were purchased from a network of highly respected suppliers and were delivered to Tiffany with the company’s signature on them. For whatever reason, most likely just the sheer inconvenience of trying to coordinate a factory located in a different continent to its administrative base in New York in an age before telephones, fax and email, Tiffany backed away from watch manufacture and concentrated on its retail business. Interestingly, there was a very brief exception to this between 18, when Tiffany set up an outpost to produce its own in-house pocket watch movements just outside Geneva. As with Cartier, the famous French jewellery house, it is important to appreciate that Tiffany wasn’t a watch manufacturer, but in fact was purely a retailer.
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