Watch lovers often rack their brains over how to transport and store their collection. Some swear by the watch box, others prefer a simple leather watch pouch to carry a single piece. For the latter, Avel & Men offers a leather travel watch pouch ; we will come back to it in a future article. But vintage lovers, who always have a taste for beautiful things, very often prefer the leather watch roll. Elegant and easy to fold, it fits in a QUIBERON backpack, but it can also be handy for carrying your watches and storing them in a safe during long absences…
Avel & Men, which offers a range of leather goods for lovers of the sea, often sees people smile and wonder when we tell them that we make leather watch rolls ("marmottes," as they are called in French)! Few people know this object exists, even though it is so practical and is also used for other purposes: painters use similar leather pouches to store their brushes, as do pen collectors, who appreciate the large, tall compartments of Avel & Men watch rolls, which keep objects from touching each other.
So we wanted to understand where this word came from. The marmot is a small rodent mammal known for spending the whole winter in a state of torpor in a deep, very carefully sealed burrow. Should we see a link with the owner of an Avel & Men leather watch roll who spends his Breton winter restoring and servicing beautiful regatta chronographs hunted down at auction houses the rest of the year? That is a step we will not take.
Digging into the Latin roots, we find "mas, maris," the male, and "mons, montis," the mountain. The marmotte would thus be the male of the mountain. A connection with the GENEVA watch pouch and its Lake Geneva nestled between the mountains? A unique bond between a man and his vintage chrono?
If we combine the Greek and Latin origins: MUS / MURIS means mouse, but Greek dictionaries point out that for some authors it can also mean the ermine or the weasel. And we find our MON / MONTIS, the mountain, again. The marmot, the ermine of the mountain?
Still on the subject of watch storage, our research also taught us that the word marmotte was used as early as the 17th century to describe a trunk made of two chests fitting one into the other, to organize and protect the contents. We like the idea, because it immediately brings to mind pirates carrying their spoils of war aboard magnificent ships, sailing downwind in a strong breeze, protecting their valuables as best they could. What a lovely image for us collectors, who sometimes carry our finest finds in our watch roll!
We hope you will never again store your watches in your leather watch roll without seeing this beautiful object in a new light! Discover our collection and new arrivals at www.avel-and-men.com
