Already a subscriber?Ida Lee is a Sydney collector whose fascination with watches began at an early age and led ultimately to her, at one point, working in the industry. Her progression from dalliance to daily employment would come as no surprise to die-hard aficionados.
As for the blossoming of her interest in timepieces, she recalls, “I’d stare at watches and clocks as a child, although I never understood the mechanics. Later I learnt my grandmother and aunt had worked in a watch factory in Shanghai as jewel setters.”Even so, while her interest was “always festering in the background”, she never knew how to learn more until meeting an ad-hoc group of watch enthusiasts, Calibre 61, in Sydney in 2016. “I found my mob through watches.