Watch repair lends helping hands to ex-grad student

Small business profile for The Commercial Appeal

Jan. 7, 2011

Horology. It’s a silly word, to be sure, and Colin Britton knows words. The 31-year-old opened Britton’s Antique and Modern Watch Repair Service in November, but before that he was an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Memphis.

“Grad school kind of went awry for me and I was out,” Britton said. “I’d done all my coursework, but completely lost faith in my thesis and I panicked.”

With student loans coming due, he knew he needed to get back in school as a full-time student to defer them and figured that as long as he was going to school, it might as well be to learn a trade.

“I’ve been collecting watches since I was a kid, I thought they were neat, but I never thought much about it, it was just a hobby and something I like to do,” Britton said. “I knew it would give me the ability to be my own boss, which would hopefully give me some time to continue being creative in some small way.”

He Googled various trades and Gem City College’s School of Horology in Quincy, Ill., came up. It was the closest to Memphis, so he enrolled. The course in horology — the art of designing and making clocks — is self-paced, taking some eight months and others three or four years. Britton finished in 15 months … (read more)