PHOENIX, Arizona – A Phoenix man found quite the treasure at a thrift store.
“I’ve found some stuff in the past that I have been really excited about and stoked, but this is one of those things you’re like, one day, one day it will happen, and it happened for me,” said Zach Norris, treasure hunter.
Norris hit the thrift store jackpot.
“It still had the little tag wrapped around it.”
Finding a rare 1959 Jaeger-Lecoultre watch at the Goodwill in Phoenix priced at only $5.99.
“The center face dial moved and when that happened, that’s when I knew it was real. I didn’t even want to give it to her to scan,” he said. “I was like, you can scan it in my hand if you want to. I just didn’t want to let it go.”
A collector himself, he raced outside and called his little brother.
“I’m like uh so I just got out of a Goodwill, and he’s like ‘what did you find?’ like he already knew, it was exciting.”
There were only about 900 of the diving watches ever made.
“I know I didn’t want to keep it because it’s kind of above my means to have a piece like that. I had a couple of good offers.”
After his find ended up on hodinkee.com, a watch collectors website, a collector in San Francisco brought the watch for $35,000 and threw in a $4,000 mega speed master watch to sweeten the deal.
Zach says the money is going for his big day.
“We are planning a wedding,” he said. “We’ve been planning a wedding for a while, but now that we have the extra funds we’re going to go ahead and start taking care of everything.
Zach has advice for anyone hoping to hit it big trolling thrift stores.
“You can do it. Research everything. Just take your phone in there and if you see something that looks goofy, you haven’t seen it before, Google it. You never know.”
Zach also donated some of his profits back to the Goodwill.
