Lately my wife and me were discussing the topic of generating an additional revenue stream for our household. Actually we were thinking of combining a hobby (since we have an atelier in the back garden with no purpose yet)  with some minor income streams attached to make it interesting and not a complete structured way of losing time.

My eye fell on making watches (since a good watch idea can make a lot of money) and therefore I sought out to look for watch hobby tools 1/2. In the page 10 Essential Tools For The Watchmaker’s Toolkit 1/2 (which I found via this watch article ) I found a wealth of background information. Apparently there is a whole world of concepts and terms I have never heard before, which, in itself, makes it pretty interesting to dive into this topic.

So what do you think is needed for making your own watch? Do you think of screwdrivers, a glass and some electronics? Think again, you will need pliers, polishing cloths, staking tools, gaskets, de-magnetizers, tweezers Submit and a LOT of more stuff. It’s like the stuff you need to build a house but then on a 5cmx5cm area. But apart from the tools needed, actually I think it would be a sort of ZEN but a very rewarding since you can completely use your full creativity in making watches.

Just think of making revenue in niche markets for watches e.g. a casino watch (as in the picture) or any other hot topic, heck, I could even create merchandise watches on the fly for companies or trendy buzzes that fly over the Internet. There is a lot of money in this and basically I think it would be a very cool thing to do.

Let’s make a short list to see if I can convince myself:

a. The space needed is 1 desk, which basically could fit in our atelier
b. We can acquire all tooling needed from the list mentioned in watch hobby tools 1/2
c. We can would work any creative idea and make several showcases
d. Inventory does not take much place and furthermore shipping is just a box
e. We could sell them via any marketplace like e-bay
f. There is a great shortage of watchmakers, the U.S. needs 4000 watchmakers as most of them are retiring
g. It would be great for me to create actual physical things instead of virtual software (“ZEN”)
h. Watch exports grew this year with 13%

The only downside is that we would need to invest a) in “learning new skills”, but then again, this is my daily practice and b) buy screwdrivers and other materials as listed above, but the costs could be striped away to the income generated.