The Ukrainian Watch I Refuse to Buy Online
Because I want to buy it in person...
I’m traveling today so I wanted to get out a lighter piece that’s meaningful to me. Back in the office tomorrow.
I’m a watch guy…
Wait, don’t leave!
I’m not the pretentious kind who buys shiny wrist candy for status.
Usually when I say, “I’m a watch guy,” I get some eye rolls. But my watch collection began with John Travolta trying to steal two nuclear weapons.
In the late 90s, my wife and I watched Broken Arrow, John Woo’s gloriously overcooked 1996 action movie where Travolta plays a rogue Air Force pilot wearing a two-tone Breitling Aerospace.
(This was before my Air Force days; I was still in the Army at the time).
The watch gets its own full-screen moment during a countdown to an explosion, which is the kind of excess a John Woo film considers restraint.
My wife noticed that I noticed the watch.
On our first anniversary, she bought me a very close facsimile to the Breitling: A Citizen watch that, at the time, was still quite expensive for a lower-enlisted servicemember, (but nowhere near the Breitling’s price tag).
That watch became the start of a collection, though “collection” gives the whole enterprise a bit more financial discipline than it deserves.
I don’t chase the fanciest movement or the best resale number. I don’t buy expensive watches for status. I really don’t like the color gold at all. I own watches because they mean something to me, and every one I keep has to earn its spot in the box.
The anniversary watch represents my wife, and the beginning of all of this. It’s the one that taught me a watch could be a bookmark stuck into a specific moment of your life; something utilitarian that you could also glance down at years later and teleport back in the room where you got it.
The second one came out of uniform. Nothing fancy; a plain G-Shock field watch that spent its formative years being introduced to carcinogenic environments no sane person would choose.
It got rained on, sweated on, and banged on metal like it was just another piece of government issue equipment. Through all of that nonsense, it kept on running. Because of that, I feel a type of loyalty to the brand.
The third marks a professional milestone I still don’t fully believe happened; the kind of thing younger me would have assumed was a clerical error if you’d told him it was coming.
None of the three showed up because an OMEGA forum promised a twelve percent annual return and the chance to be an insufferable prick at a dinner party.
They showed up because a person, a place, or a moment demanded to be worn.
The Ukrainian watch that kept finding me
Enter the Ukrainian Kleynod watch…
Kleynod kept turning up at the edges of my Ukraine reporting long before I ever went looking for it.
Hmmm, that’s a cool watch in that presidential photograph…
Wait, does that watch face have the Ukrainian Tryzub symbol?
A collection built around Antonov aircraft, the same aircraft I’d already spent years writing about in an entirely different context?
Eventually I stopped scrolling past it.
The Kyiv Watch Factory started in 1997, after Ukraine got its independence in 1991. It’s the first and only factory in Ukraine created to make watches on a large scale.
KWF made its first watch to commemorate Leonid Kadeniuk’s flight on the space shuttle Columbia for mission STS-87. This mission was the first crewed space mission for a fully independent Ukraine.
In 2002, five years after it was founded, the factory started the Kleynod trademark.
Kleynod assembles its watches in Kyiv, using some movements from Swiss companies (Ronda and Sellita). The outer case is made out of 316L stainless steel and the watches also go through a four-stage quality check, plus come with a 36-month warranty. I’m not sponsored by Kleynod despite this sounding like I’m trying to sell you one.
