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“When I was a freshman in high school I wasn’t all that interested in history,” says Jason Ruedas, the owner of Rue Vintage, a small, online shop that sells vintage chronographs, many through Instagram. But in his bio, Ruedas refers to himself as “a wannabe historian,” and the watches on his website are listed with as much information as he can scrounge up. “Eventually you grow fond of it when you’re an adult, and you’re surrounded with all these old things, and you have to sell it and explain to someone why it’s rare and why they should buy it.”
Ruedas’s business is not the result of a long-term love affair with watches; it’s merely a logical progression of a lifetime selling things. As Ruedas tells it, when he came to New York from the Philippines in the mid-1990s, he just needed to make ends meet. That started with selling bootleg concert tapes, but it eventually progressed into the practice of retail arbitrage: buying things at a discount in-store then flipping them for a profit online.
“I got this from my mom, because back when I was a kid, she would sell jewelry,” he says. “I remember being dragged into jewelry stores and pawn shops, and she would buy jewelry and flip it to our neighbors, to people she knew she could sell to.”
In addition to selling watches, Ruedas makes a living selling vintage and hard-to find video games and memorobilia. This is just a snapshot of his impressive collection. Photo by Jason Ruedas
Eventually, Ruedas settled into to a steady gig finding and selling rare and hard-to-find video games and gaming gear, but he soon developed an interest in watches. At first, it was mostly the kind of timepieces watch nerds cut their teeth on: mechanical Seikos, Orients, even some Fossils. But Ruedas soon fell in love with the Hamilton Chrono-Matic, one of the first chronograph watches to use automatic winding. “I thought this watch is really cool, it’s small… about 36mm, so these were like perfect on my wrist. They looked great, and they were still sort of affordable at the time.”
