Eighteen Years of Constellation Trivia

I launched this blog on June 28^th, 2006. At the time, eBay and other on-line markets were, largely, an unregulated frontier more closely resembling a mercantile variant of Dodge City, circa 1870, than a fair and dependable marketplace. Cowboys, bushwhackers and outlaws roamed the fertile plains of on-line auction sites; Oriental crime gangs offloaded wagon loads of fakes with impunity; Frankenmeisters saw many opportunities to make a quick buck with their despicable horological confections, and buyer, and indeed seller, protection were pretty well non-existent.  

Eighteen years ago all of the major Omega-related chat fora were run by horological petrol-heads for the most part funding set-ups and ongoing operations themselves, or through member contributions and a trickle of advertising revenue. It was on these fora where we learned from each other and contributed our knowledge.    

By 2006, the “Buyer Beware” mantra had almost reached hysterical proportions on some watch fora. I felt that a certain hubris and heartlessness had entered collecting cultures, placing, in my opinion, a bit too much of the blame on those who had been duped and too little of the blame on the parasites and cockroaches who did the duping. And so I was motivated to set up a resource that in the case of Omega Constellations would perhaps help redress the imbalance a little.

Another strong motive was to share with others my enthusiasm for Omega Constellations of the Fifties and Sixties, a collection of superb timepieces that time and the ill fortune of the brand in the Seventies had left undervalued and underappreciated.    

Quite a few of my earliest posts involved naming and shaming some of the more outrageous attempts to separate unsuspecting watch buyers from their money, however I tired of that soon enough. I decided that the best way to achieve both of the above ends was to present well-researched and detailed essays about various aspects of vintage Constellation and other Omega collections so as to help people value and appreciate the brand and acquire the knowledge required to make a judicious acquisition.

Until 2013, I travelled extensively on business, spending up to twenty weeks a year in hotel rooms in various cities in Australia and around the world. In the evenings, instead of watching hours of brain-numbing trash on cable TV or viewing breathless reports about nothing important on CNN and BBC News, I decided to use my time productively and write about various aspects of my favourite vintage brand, the fruits of which grew over time into the most comprehensive resource on Omega Constellation watches on the Web.

At the time of writing, this blog has attracted a total of over six million visitors who have downloaded essays on Omega Constellation and other topics hundreds of thousands of times.  Hopefully this resource has increased awareness and helped re-establish the reputation of Omega Constellation watches of the 1950s and 60s to where it was during the halcyon decades, that of the premier production watch brand of its time.