Why Choose to Engrave your Watch?
For Centuries, people have added meaningful inscriptions to the back of their watches, often with short, personal messages of love, or short verses or words of special meaning between two people. Not only can this bring extra meaning to the watch itself for the wearer, it can also offer enduring records of sentimental history when handed down as a family heirloom.
As engraving processes have been combined with technology, engravings such as fingerprints, symbols and handwriting copy and small artworks have become more easily available to incorporate into the design of the engraving in addition to traditional text inscriptions.
Even if you did not have time to think about having your watch engraved when originally purchased or gifted, you might still like to have it engraved as a special Birthday, Graduation, Anniversary gift, valentine’s gift, or simply to let someone know you care about them. Even as a receiver of a heirloom watch, you may wish to mark this special gift with a meaningful inscription.
Updating an existing watch with a new inscription can also be perceived as a heartfelt and eco-friendly way to uplift an existing item with renewed or deeper meaning, increasing its wearable longevity. It can avoid the extraction of new, materials and the chemical processes often involved in gifting a brand new watch.
What types of Watches Can be Engraved?
Our Watch (back) Engraving Service is available on most metal backed watches (Stainless Steel, Sterling Silver, Gold). Unfortunately, we cannot engrave tungsten, wooden or ceramic watch backs.
What can be engraved on a Watch Back?
We offer many options for what types of engraving you can add to your watch, allowing you to use your imagination freely for true, meaningful personalisation. These options include standard text engraving in most freely available fonts, symbols, your own artwork, fingerprint, handwriting, patterns or logos, monograms etcetera.
Don’t forget that as watch backs are often circular, you can also add engraving around the circle itself (dependent upon any existing makers marks and engravings). We can add different messages on more than one position on the watch back to fit around existing makers marks. If you are designing your own artwork to be engraved, do make sure that you remember to work around these areas.
Why choose us to Engrave your Watch?
Insurance.
All prices include insurance within our workshop up to a maximum of £750 per item. Please see our terms and conditions for further information.
For postal services, we recommend that you use a service that insures your watch to the replacement value, as we cannot be held responsible for items that are lost or damaged in transit to or from our workshop. We take photographs of your watch upon arrival at and despatch from our workshop.
All prices are plus postage fees (Free for collection from The Engraving Van). We recommend that you chose fully insured postage options, such as Royal Mail Special Delivery.
Engraving Methods.
We are proud that we primarily engrave using a traditional method of (machine) engraving using a diamond tipped tool. The diamond tool is moved across the metal to remove some of the surface layers, leaving a clear, bright cut. For this reason, it is often praised as being one of the most durable types of machine engraving and is suitable for very fine, detailed engraving. This method has been used to personalise jewellery and other objects for decades.
More recently, this technique has been combined with contemporary digital technologies to make it easier and quicker to convert any style of font, design or image for the engraving process. Because the process is faster than Hand Engraving, it can offer a more affordable engraving option for customers.
For some watches, we still find it best to engrave on our manual engraving machine.
For some styles of engraving on suitable objects, we also offer deep, milled engraving. This technique cuts away more of the surface of the metal to leave a deeper engraving. This particular style of engraving is not suitable for intricate or fine detail designs. Please ask us if you are interested in deep Mill Engraving.
Customer Service.
We are a small workshop and take time to work with you personally to check your exact requirements and only engrave your watch once you have confirmed that you are happy with the proof (draft engraving) we send to you by email. Although our timescales are efficient, we do not rush turnaround of your engraving on an impersonal, factory production type basis. There is no middleman. You will be communicating with the engraver themselves to ensure there are no communication errors.
Sustainability.
We operate as sustainably and as environmentally friendly as possible within our workshop and are always open to considering new ideas to keep improving. See our sustainability ethics here.