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Adam Golden, the owner of Menta Watches, a vintage watch dealer in Miami, wasn’t always into old timepieces. “I started my life as a watch collector and enthusiast through modern watches,” he says. “For several years, I didn’t consider or even think about vintage watches. It was only modern stuff because it was a natural entry point.”
Then, when Golden was living abroad in Russia, he discovered his first “proper” vintage watch, a Rolex Daytona reference 6262 from the 1960s with a black dial. “It was like a light bulb went off,” he says. “I sold all of my modern watches and focused strictly on collecting vintage because of the emotions they brought. It’s similar to when I drive a vintage car. It takes me back to a simpler time. It makes me think of what was going on in that era, the story that it’s lived, the aesthetic of it. And for me, quite frankly, it just boils down to an emotion—how it makes me feel.”
Golden realized that the narrative he’d told himself about the kind of watch collector he was had shifted in the wake of that discovery. “I knew that this is where I needed to be in my collecting journey, and this is what I liked, and this is what I was going to do moving forward in terms of collecting,” he says.
