We Made a Watch with the Postal Service
Later this month we're releasing the Vaer C5 Postmaster, an officially licensed collaboration with the United States Postal Service. We're not going to show you the watch yet. But we did want to explain why we've taken on this project, and why it means so much to us.
A Partner From Day One
When we started shipping watches in 2016, USPS was our whole logistics operation. All of our inventory sat in the closet of Reagan's apartment in West LA. We both had day jobs, so the routine was: get home, pack whatever had come in that day, load the envelopes into a couple of IKEA bags, and walk them down to the nearest collection box.
Early on it was maybe a dozen orders a night. Then it was a few dozen, and then more than one mailbox would physically take. We started spreading the drop-offs across the collection boxes around the neighborhood, and eventually we just gave up and drove everything to the nearest sorting facility.
The company looks a lot different now, but USPS is still our default carrier. They've delivered the majority of the hundreds of thousands of orders we've ever shipped. We never really chose them in those early days. They were just what was there, and they came through every time. At some point it started to feel strange that we'd never made anything to acknowledge that.
Older Than the Country
The other reason this made sense to us is the history. The Continental Congress set up the Post Office on July 26, 1775, with Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General. That's a year before the Declaration of Independence. For most of American history, the mail was how letters, newspapers, and ideas moved across a very spread-out country, and the Postal Service has been there for every stage of it since. The name of the watch is a nod to Franklin's office.
We also like that USPS has stuck to buying American for a long time, which is something we care about and have tried to do ourselves. Carrier uniforms have to be made from domestic components. The old Grumman mail trucks were built in Pennsylvania starting in 1987, and a lot of them are still on the road well past the 24 years they were supposed to last. The new fleet is being built in South Carolina. For a government institution operating at that scale, that's a real commitment, and it's the same standard we try to hold ourselves to. The C5 Postmaster is assembled here in the US by our own team, like the rest of our lineup.
What We Can Say for Now
It's a field watch, it's built to the same standard as everything else we make, and it's designed around the era we always come back to, when a watch was something you just wore every day without thinking about it. It ships through USPS only, which felt like the only honest way to do it. You'll be able to pick Ground Advantage or Priority Mail at checkout.
It goes on sale mid-October exclusively at vaerwatches.com. Design, specs, and pricing all get revealed then, and we'll be posting a long-from founders video walking through the decisions we made. If you want to see it the day it drops, keep an eye on your email inbox.
