Family Fridays: The Watch That Changed Everything
A Great-Grandfathers Watch that set the tone for a generation
Written by Dr. Adam Fleddermann, Founder & CEO of Fleddermann von Rieste, who designs every watch and oversees manufacturing and operations.
When I was a boy, my dad had a way of handling one particular watch that I noticed long before I understood it.
He would wind it carefully. Polish it gently. He only wore it on special occasions, and even then he set it down like it was made of something more precious than metal and glass. I remember thinking that was a little strange. It didn’t look like much to me.
One day I asked him why that watch mattered so much.
What I got back wasn’t an answer. It was stories.
Stories about my great-grandfather Bernard, a man I never met and somehow felt I knew by the end of the afternoon. Stories about work on the family farm, the kind that starts before light and never asks whether you feel like it. Stories about pride, about perseverance, about the German heritage that shaped our family long before any of us were around to notice it.
I was young enough that I couldn’t tell you every word now. What I kept was the feeling. Somewhere in there it landed on me that the watch wasn’t a tool for keeping time. It was a vessel for memory. Something you could hold in your hand that tied you to people whose hands you’d never shaken.
A watch from Ritzi Jewelers in Brookville, Indiana
That watch came from Ritzi Jewelers over in Brookville. It is still the reason all of this exists.
I didn’t decide to build watches that day. I was far too young for that, and I’d have told you I wanted to be about six other things. But something got set down in me that afternoon and never quite left. Years later, when I started this family owned watch company here in Indiana, I understood I was chasing that feeling a good deal more than I was chasing a business. Every watch this Indiana watch company assembles now traces back to a farm and an afternoon.
An heirloom is made in a moment, not a factory
An heirloom doesn’t get made in a factory. It gets made in a moment like that one, between a father and a son, holding a piece of family history.
Which is why I’ve come to think heirloom watches have almost nothing to do with what you spend. They have to do with somebody saying out loud that a thing is meant to be handed on.
If you want the longer argument, I wrote a whole piece on what makes a watch an heirloom.
That’s all I have for you this Friday.
If there’s something in your own family that shaped you, a watch or a ring or a pocketknife or a rocking chair, I’d like to hear about it. Just hit reply. I read them.
Dr. Adam Fleddermann, Founder & CEO
Dr. Adam Fleddermann founded Fleddermann von Rieste after growing up watching his father care for a watch passed down through generations of the family. He designs every watch and oversees the brand’s global supply chain, operations, and manufacturing, working alongside an AWCI-certified watchmaker and his team who lead the hand-assembly of every timepiece in Indiana.
