The Volmax OKEHA and a Watch Komrade's meltdown...

Craig Hester gets cranky with his own potential costumers at WUS...

The Final Edition OKEHA was/is an LE of 300 , agreed to be made and offered by Volmax to a fora members in Europe (some are WUS members as well) , as I get a bit deeper into this shit and aside from the original WUS whining (I would too BTW), I starting to realized that it is a sustancial amount of this watches across Europe for trade/sale....
http://forums.watchuseek.com/f10/oke...on-761006.html

Very interesting, even fascinating, read; makes me wonder just who is the 'bad guy' and who is the 'good' one here. I especially liked the comment from one gent who said he'd rather poke his eyes out with "cocktail sticks" than buy a fake...just once, I'd like to put someone like that to the test - and I have the swizzle sticks to make it happen, too!!

This is probably a trickie issue and a combination of lack of ethics (Volmax) and lack of common sense (Hester)...

I have heard of problems with Volmax in the past just can't find the threads now, think it was around 2008-09. Think it is a shame ,reminds me of Renato with LE's. Let's face it a true LE is 1-10 max mostly 1-5. think that's why I have a problem with LE of that size or larger I don't by that it is a true LE.

eddiea wrote:This is probably a trickie issue and a combination of lack of ethics (Volmax) and lack of common sense (Hester)...

My take: Volmax, normally a pretty good manufacturer, made too many of these Ocean watches and needed to cut their losses (or failed to sell all of the LEs and needed to cut their losses.) Hester, who's a good guy (I've done business with him in the past) is offered these to move them out on Shop.

Hester, who's been inactive on WUS for some years (according to his posts there) would be nuts not to take these watches and sell 'em. The Okeah is almost a grail watch for Russkie collectors, and a new version, at a decent price, would sell pretty fast, especially from a good maker like Volmax. There are probably plenty of these available around the world in Franken versions, so the Volmax name on them would make them somewhat less "homagey".

WUS had a deal with Volmax, and Volmax apparently stuck it in and broke it off--which isn't unusual when dealing the the Russians, and Hester stepped in a made some money off of it. WUS didn't like the buttfucking they got, and they lashed out at Hester, who basically told them all to fuck off.

Craig Hester is one of a very few guys responsible for making Russian and VE available in North America, and he's been doing this for quite a few years--from what I've heard, he had at least a couple of years when JTV dropped watches and before getting picked up by Shop where he was barely getting by. He's one of the very few distributors on Shop who's pretty honest, and the way he got raked over the coals on WUS was, to me, uncalled for.

I tend to agree to that story line with you, most likely that's what happened.
I think Hester fault was to get cranky about it to the point of silliness, e. g. statements like "I don't care if the watch sells here or not", "This is one of the reasons I don't participate here" etc. are just stupid, those are the same folks that have done business with him in the past.
I will add that althought Hester have indeed stay absent from WUS as far as posting or commenting everyone knows he watch the forums closely, so ignorance is not an excuse (from the WUS folks perspective) ... also was reading that Volmax does a significant volume of business with Hester, he's no casual buyer.
As a side note... in Europe, there is a number of these watches showing up in different configurations same identical dial, but with another crown at 9 (or not) etc and I'm not sure, if these semi-replicas are made by Volmax or other Russian factories.