I've been looking for a VAT for about two years. I don't know how many IWC made but they are currently very difficult to find. They seemed to be available pretty readily on the forums a couple of years ago (a few DWCers had them too) but they seem to have all but dried up. I've looked everywhere, setup watchrecon alerts, talked to everyone I knew who might have a line on one and nothing. I half-jokingly put a WTB ad on TZ last week and lo and behold someone from Finland responded. We exchanged some emails and it turned out he was traveling to Las Vegas for the CES this week. He brought the watch with him and shipped it from there. It just arrived this morning and I couldn't be happier. Sometimes you wait so long for something and then when you finally get it there's a bit of a letdown. Thankfully, that's not the case here. I plan to keep this one for a long time.
He'll probably hate me for doing this, but I have to give a quick shout out to Master Wu. The seller of the VAT was only going to be in the US for a couple of days and I had a very short window to get shipping arranged. I was scrambling to setup a ParcelPro account in time (I didn't want to use USPS for this one) but it was taking longer than expected. I asked Matt if he had any suggestions for getting the watch shipped here with sufficient insurance. He generously offered to use his account to arrange for the shipment, and that evening I received an electronic shipping label from him that I forwarded to the seller in Vegas. And to top it off he said he'd even cover all shipping and insurance costs. Can you believe that? Wait, what's that? You didn't say that? I'm sure I heard it. Anyway, we'll work it out
Thanks again Matt!!I haven't taken any more pictures yet so I'll post this one again:
..Boy, really seems like
