When the pandemic hit in 2020, Katie Papp, like many of us, developed a side hustle. To help pay for her son’s college tuition, she started selling vintage housewares online but eventually stumbled on something much more profitable while on Pinterest: Seiko’s funky Half Moon watch.
Papp immediately started searching for one to buy herself. “I purchased my first Half Moon watch on eBay in September 2023 for $55 and resold it a month later for $220,” Papp told me. Since then, she has ditched housewares and entirely redirected her focus on reselling vintage watches. All thanks to the Seiko Half Moon, which remains the only style of watch she actively gets inquiries about.
“The last Half Moon watch I sold last month went for $800,” she said. (Papp currently has one listed for $825.) “I source from many different places, and the prices have all increased by at least 800% since I first started purchasing them. I have found some listings currently on eBay as high as $1,900.”
This eye-watering price increase is due in part to the fact that, as Papp was discovering the Half Moon, it was quickly becoming one of TikTok’s most viral watches. Search the name on TikTok and you’ll see simple videos showcasing the watch from all over the world that fetch hundreds of thousands of views. The Half Moon’s virality is a product of the hobby’s many trends coalescing: The watch community is no longer small nor dominated by men, and as tastes drift toward zesty shaped watches, collectors are looking for accessible entry points (because not everyone can afford a Cartier Crash).
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Depending on who you ask, it’s a really fun time—or a really tedious time—to be a watch collector. The rise in popularity of the aforementioned Crash, set aflame by the fuel of social media, has ushered in a new wave of eccentric grails, challenging the status quo long held by steel sport watches. Our collective obsession is now focused on the weird and the wonderful. These timepieces, like the Piaget Polo or Audemars Piguet’s ‘Cobra,’ once considered diamonds in the rough, have undergone the TikTok treatment, resulting in skyrocketing prices on the secondary market and heated discussion on Reddit. Now, the humble Seiko Half Moon watch is filling that same need for collectors who might not have offshore bank accounts.
Seiko’s asymmetrical Half Moon, commonly regarded as hailing from the ’90s, actually originated as the jewelry-forward “Rivoli” design in 1986. Industry heads will note that this year falls at the tail-end of a calamitous time for the industry known as “The Quartz Crisis” when quartz-powered watch batteries threatened the sheer existence of mechanical timekeeping. But, for Seiko, the Japanese brand widely credited for making the quartz battery mainstream, this was no crisis—in fact, the brand would most likely call this time the Quartz Revolution. Empowered by their affordable, efficient technology, Seiko was free to experiment, creating unique watches at a mass scale. (As watch enthusiast Elias Marte told me, “Seiko is the Toyota of watches.”) The ’80s, too, were a time when sartorial imaginations ran wild, and the Rivoli watch’s name, a nod to Paris’s fashionable rue de Rivoli, is perhaps a nod to that spirit.
