Fred Savage, the actor best known for his childhood role in the television comedy “The Wonder Years,” has taken on a new part in real life: watch collector and entrepreneur.
In the past six months or so, he attended Geneva Watch Days, WatchTime New York and the Dec. 6 Important Watches auction at Sotheby’s New York. He also is a member of Classic Watch Club, a collectors’ group in Manhattan, and owns about 50 watches.
“Watch collecting started as a hobby, because I was really interested in these mechanical objects that still worked and looked so great a hundred years after they were manufactured,” Mr. Savage, 48, said during a phone interview (wearing, he noted, a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox GT). “The deeper I’ve gotten into watches, my knowledge has grown. It has really enriched my life — almost every aspect of my life — because of the people that it has introduced me to.”
And late last month Mr. Savage officially introduced Timepiece Grading Specialists, or TGS, a business that rates a watch’s condition for authentication or valuation purposes. Fees start at $250 per watch, which would include a detailed report with photos; appraisals, servicing and storage are available at additional cost. The business began accepting watches for evaluation last fall in a kind of soft launch, and three of the watches sold at the Sotheby’s sale in December had TGS assessments.
Mr. Savage said his company was meant to fill a void in the watch community. “I realized that, with the huge marketplace that’s like the Wild West, nobody’s looking out for the collector,” he said. “I looked at all these other collectible verticals: Whether it’s comic books or coins or baseball cards or sports cards or shoes or video games, every one of these collectibles has one, if not multiple, third-party authentication and grading services.”
Mr. Savage was speaking from Dayton, Ohio, where his business is headquartered in the offices of Stoll & Company, a watch repair company that he gave a minority ownership of the business in exchange for handling its horological work. Although Mr. Savage lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their three children, he has been commuting to Ohio regularly since August as he is the brand’s only full-time staff member.
His job responsibilities lack Hollywood glamour: He takes orders from the company website, unboxes watches when they arrive, photographs them when required and packs them up when they are ready to return. When he is in Ohio, he said, he stays at a rented apartment furnished from Ikea and Target, drives a 2021 Subaru Crosstrek and works out at a local high school gym.
“I think he truly wants to build this thing to be a success,” said Emily Stoll, Stoll’s vice president of business development. “You can’t do that from a distance.”
Mr. Savage said he had been thinking about the need for a grading service for several years, inspired, in part, by a problem-riddled watch that he bought online. When Hollywood shut down in 2023 during the writers’ and actors’ strikes he started working on the business and has been focusing solely on it since then.
The previous year he had been fired as an executive producer and director of a reboot of “The Wonder Years” when 20th Television, the studio behind the revitalized series, said it had been made aware of allegations of what it described as “inappropriate conduct.” Mr. Savage denied the claims at the time.
He also had denied similar accusations in the past, including an assault and harassment complaint in 2018, which was dismissed, and a 1993 sexual harassment lawsuit, which was settled.
When asked about the complaints recently, Mr. Savage said he would not comment.
His interest in vintage watches goes back decades. Mr. Savage said he bought his first one — a boxy stainless-steel model with large Art Deco numerals by the Illinois Watch Company — at Wanna Buy a Watch?, a Los Angeles resale boutique. It cost about $300.
“It’s not pristine by any stretch,” he said of the timepiece, which he still wears: “It’s beat up, the dial is stained, but it had this charm about it.”
He then began reading online forums and websites, buying mechanical watches from similar brands. “It wasn’t that I was setting out to get American watches.” he said. “It was just that these were really cool watches.”
“I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he acknowledged, “but for $300 or $450, you could get a watch that was 80 years old and had this great story, that people really weren’t wearing.”
By 2017, when he was working on location in New York City on the Netflix series “Friends from College,” he fell in with a group of collectors and vintage resellers and began attending auctions.
Initially, some watch collectors had doubts. Morgan King, a collector in Los Angeles who met Mr. Savage in 2017, was among them. “I was a little bit skeptical,” he said recently, thinking, as he put it, “’Here’s just another celebrity who has cash who wants to flex.’”
But Mr. Savage quickly changed his mind. “Once we started talking, in the first five minutes I was like, ‘This guy’s for real — he caught the bug,’” Mr. King said, who is on the TGS board of advisers in an unpaid role. “He really is looking at things that no one would care about except for watch collectors, such as Swatches, Seikos and Citizens.”
As for his acceptance into the world of watch collecting, Mr. Savage said, “I think that, like anything, it has nothing to do with my background or what I’d been doing before. If you’re in it, and you’re really passionate and interested and curious, and you want to learn and you have something to add, I think you get welcome.”
Craig Karger, the founder of the horology website Wrist Enthusiast, said a deep collection such as Mr. Savage’s “adds credibility to that celebrity as a collector.”
“Someone with a diverse collection — and not just all of the latest, greatest hits — is always nice to see, no matter who it is, whether it’s a collector or a celebrity.”
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