Rather than selling watches and products that other people have, popular social media account IFL Watches (with founder Karar Aimer coming from the watch industry) decided (wisely) that it needed something exclusive to sell. That led to a journey of watch modification where IFL Watches would create aftermarket customizations of popular inexpensive watches, mainly from Japanese brands such as Casio, Seiko, and Citizen. The resulting items are interesting and often spirited bespoke watches that are still pretty affordably priced. Today, IFL Watches claims to have an in-house team of artists, and watches like this “Time Is Money” version of the Citizen Tsuyosa Automatic are done by re-painting the dial by the team’s artists. The concept is fun, and while these are not for everyone, I think the idea is very sound and marketable.

Today, I’d like to look at one of the more recent IFL Watches Citizen Tsuyosa-based watches, known as the “Time Is Money.” IFL Watches has taken a real liking to this base watch given its mixture of cost-effectiveness, classic design, and robust architecture that allows for the type of customization needed. The underlying watch is the Citizen Tsuyosa Automatic NJ015, which has a retail price of $450 USD. IFL Watches sources these timepieces and then creates a value-added process, and in addition to painting the dials, ships them in their own packaging. The resulting product might be about twice the original retail price of the Citizen Tsuyosa, but that is a pretty small price to pay for this type of bespoke artistic originality. If the “Time Is Money” watch isn’t your thing from a composition standpoint, I recommend checking out the various other customized Citizen Tsuyosa and other watches available from IFL Watches.

Here is a quick recap of the basic tech specs of the Citizen Tsuyosa NJ015 watch series. These timepieces have a 40mm-wide steel case, flat sapphire crystal (with a magnifier lens for the date), and a matching “President-style” steel bracelet. Inside these versions of the Tsuyosa is a Citizen in-house caliber 8210 automatic movement (3Hz operational frequency with 42 hours of power reserve). The base watches have flat, colored dials and a decent amount of space between the dial and the crystal. This makes for a good platform on which to paint something exclusive since in other watches there simply isn’t space for it or entirely new parts need to be sourced. It makes things much easier when a customizer like IFL Watches does not need to replace any (or too many) parts with non-original components.

This “Time Is Money” IFL Watches limited edition comes as a set of 150 pieces and creates (as the name implies) a visual dial motif meant to suggest the theme. IFL Watches chose the deep metallic blue version of the Citizen Tsuyosa and hand-paints a traditional hourglass, greenback currency with wings, and a pile of gold coins and jewels right out of the vault of Scrooge McDuck in “Ducktales.” The hour markers, hands, and Citizen logo are all maintained, and only the space around them is painted. It is actually quite fun, and I simply adore the concept of using watch dials as a canvas for artistic creations, which is why I try to write about these types of expressive custom timepieces as much as possible.

An interesting question to ask is how Citizen might feel about this. Rolex is somewhat renowned for legally going after aftermarketers who customize its watches, worrying that the resulting quality and aesthetics don’t live up to their standards or character. Japanese companies such as Seiko, Casio, and Citizen have all had products as the subject of artistic reimaginations and appear to either be silent about it or actually willingly complicit. Rather than degrade the underlying watches, the sentiment seems to be that such artistic watches elevate the brands and their models. None have gone so far as to do something more integrated (such as what TAG Heuer was doing with Bamford for a while), but there appears to be both a willingness to supply watches to high-quality customizers and a sense of joy that the products are being used in this way. The practical sentiment seems to be this is just one more market for these products, and that’s a good thing.

I think the only complicating factor is that, aside from the bespoke dial work, there is nothing on these watches to indicate who did the customization work or that this isn’t a stock Citizen. For example, the dial of this “Time Is Money” Tsuyosa doesn’t say IFL Watches, nor is that indicated anywhere on the case or bracelet. I’m not suggesting that consumers want that, but thinking ahead, if someone purchased one of these products from an original owner and didn’t know the underlying story, it would be somewhat challenging to understand where the watch came from. Brands and customizers don’t always think that far ahead, but watch collectors routinely buy products that are years or decades old. I think it would be very helpful if there was something on these watches that would help a third party do a simple internet search in the future, to determine what this watch is all about and where it came from (as terms like “IFL Watches” or “Time Is Money”) does not appear anywhere on the product (if it isn’t connected to the original packaging materials that is). This is something for IFL Watches and their contemporaries to think about.

IFL Watches custom timepiece prices start at about $400 USD and go up to a bit over $1,000 USD. This limited-edition “Time Is Money” Citizen Tsuyosa is priced in the upper-middle range and feels like a decent value. Yes, it is more expensive than the underlying watch, but there is a lot of value added by IFL in terms of the artwork and exclusivity. Very little about this exercise feels overpriced in that regard, and I believe that IFL Watches has found a very interesting niche. Price for the limited edition of 150 pieces IFL Watches Citizen Tsuyosa Automatic “Time Is Money” is $890 USD. Learn more at the IFL Watches website.