DandyWatchman’s enthusiasm for all things mechanical began in early childhood with Legos. He filled the entire ground floor of his parents’ house with an elaborate working Lego city of his own design. When he grew up, his attention turned from Legos to cars. College and a career in business helped make the growl of a finely tuned engine into one of his life’s most cherished theme songs, but cars have their limitations. Their size and function consign them to outdoor entertainment only. He began to look for something just as hands-on and compelling as Legos or cars, but of a more versatile and ready scale. Enter the Swiss watch: a slick, irresistible little engine purring just under the edge of a shirt cuff. And so began Dandy’s deep dive into horology which of course included a thorough education in Universal Genève. It was love at first sight.
UG’s factory once sat on the shores of Lake Geneva between Rolex and Patek Philippe, pillars of the Swiss watch industry, and yet its path was decidedly different. Like its sisters, UG was a tremendous innovator with creative flare, but its products aimed more for the subject of Magritte’s The Son of Man, a faceless businessman in a bowler or perhaps a gas mask, than for the elite. A maker of the working man’s watch, UG couldn’t pivot its identity to a pure luxury product during the quartz crisis and so tragically succumbed.
More of an archeologist and preservationist of this lost brand than a collector, the man at DandyWatchman has unearthed, restored, exhibited, and rehomed examples from across the entire Universal Genève catalog. Along his UG journey, he’s met every kind of person from every walk of life: college kids looking to buy their first vintage watch, Hollywood stuntmen who have put their own watches through hell and back, and classic rock stars still rocking and still collecting. UG, he has found, is truly universal. This website is meant to serve as a catalog for his own continuously evolving collection and a repository for the deep knowledge he has acquired over the years. Welcome.