Twelve Years, Four Owners

Before CHAPELLIA

The first owner bought it for a reason they later described as bad: it matched something else they owned.

They kept it for five years and used it hard. The record from that period is thin — two lines, one of them a repair.

The First Encounter

The second owner did not buy it. They were given it, in circumstances the record describes only as transferred within family, which is the phrasing used when the detail is not ours to publish.

They added the most to the file of any owner: four entries in three years, including a note about a strap replacement carried out by someone else, with the name of the workshop. That entry has since been useful twice.

The Collection Journey

The third owner bought it at resale, from a listing that did not mention the archive at all.

They contacted us afterwards to ask whether the number meant anything. It did. The conversation that followed is the reason the transfer procedure now exists as a written process rather than an ad hoc favour — before that piece, nobody had asked to be added to a record they had not been given.

Meaning Behind The Collection

The fourth and current owner has had it for eleven months and has added nothing.

That is not a criticism. Most owners add nothing; the record is built by the minority who do. What matters is that the option is open and does not expire, and that the four names sit in sequence rather than overwriting one another.

Somebody reading it in thirty years will be able to see that this object passed through four sets of hands, that one of them repaired it, and that one of them did not know what it was when they bought it.

Milestones

Twelve years is not long for an object and is long for a record.

In that time the company has changed address twice, the certificate design has been revised, and the digital system has been rebuilt from nothing. The number stamped on the piece in the first year still resolves.