BUSINESS - WINTER 2024
RIGHT
DAVID KIM embraces tradition & ANALOG through his luxury vintage WATCH business, proving that TIMELESS DESIGN and exceptional quality NEVER go out of STYLE
D
uring WWI, as many as three hundred young women painted wrist watch dials at a plant in Orange, New Jersey. Seated at long benches, the women engaging in the meticulous and low-paying job were treated like they would be at any other job when it came to concerns of health and safety at the time – that is, hardly at all. Supervisors encouraged the workers to use their mouths to help point the brushes, and they often painted their nails with the unscented paint. Were the contents of the paint containers something like oil or acrylic, perhaps there would be no justification for this tangential introduction—there would still be sanitation concerns to be sure, just not ones that are a matter of life and death —but considering the contents were not
Story by TAYLOR DORRELL Photography by JEN BROWN Design by TORI SMITH
exclusively oil or acrylic, and instead included the radioactive chemical element with a lifespan of thousands of years known as radium, the workers developed severe health complications and eventually, after a prolonged legal battle, were able to shut the plant down. In the 1960s, however, watch manufacturers began using tritium, which is still radioactive, but safely so. “Since the watch is considered slightly radioactive, [watchmakers] legally had to denote that at the bottom [with T < 25],” David Kim, the founder of a local vintage watch dealer, told me. It was this history, one that carries with it both radioactive deaths and the changing of labor law, that inspired Kim to name his business 25 Dials. The new world of watch selling in the internet age with its ambitious and somewhat assertive discipline has inspired young entrepreneurs to “flip” otherwise aging devices. There exists today a wave of entrepreneur content creators across the country, a surge of young merchants desperate to make profits with haste and do so with a degree of public pageantry. Kim, however, is not one of them.
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