I bought about 4 months ago some Chinese "ICE" watches after stumbling across them from a Chinese supplier. I had at that time no idea what the heck an ICE watch was and thought it might melt because of the time it would take to get here to the UK from China.
However because they looked so cool with their fancy retail packaging (which was also copied) along with a cool gift bag, guarantee card and set of instructions, all with the ICE brand logo's on them, I thought I would give them a go.
When they arrived and I took them out of the packaging, I found that 2 of them were broke, which was no biggy I thought due to the price I had paid for them. Once I got them, I started to put them onto Ebay and straight away BOOM! email coming back saying that these are counterfeits and was not allowed for sale on Ebay.
I was like wow that was quick about 30 seconds to see they are counterfeit its a new world record. So after getting this telling off, I went in search of the real watches at my local jewellers in Belfast and low and behold, there they were! The selling price of a basic model of the one I had was from £79.99! My eyes nearly popped out of my head and could see from the price I paid for them and the price they should be, I got screwed by a bunch of fakes. BUT VERY GOOD FAKES I MUST SAY.
They were such good fakes that my sister in law had a red REAL GENUINE ICE WATCH her husband bought her for Christmas. I took my fake RED watch around and tried to spot the differences between them. To my astonishment, I could not find a thing at all different about the two. My brother, my sister in laws husband, took it home for 2 days to find a difference between the two and he did find one very small thing which we missed time and time again.
On the metal buckle part of the watch where the strap goes through to tighten, the REAL ICE WATCH does not have the ICE logo stamped into it which the FAKE one did. That is the only difference after several days we could see from the original to the copy that made it stand out. Even the packaging was the same down to a T. It comes with a barcode which seems to relate, all the barcodes attached, to the pink ice watch, along with a small photo of the pink watch attached to it.
There is ICE watch tags as well along with every watch which is a nice touch and is very well done. They also come in a plastic lego style box which can be used as a money box afterwards and with a black cardboard surround with a hole in the top showing you which colour is in the box.
You can now get these exact same watches with the ICE logo removed from Chinese suppliers which is a good thing. Selling counterfeits is not a good business to be in and I would not be associated with it. Overall very good watches, out of 25 I got 3 broke altogether as 2 were when it was delivered and one of them the hand fell off after about 2 weeks. The other 22? Working perfectly....the supplier also gave me some free extra batteries to go with it how sweet :D.
I have given them out to family and friends so not to rip people off but you will see people on Gumtree selling these for like £7-£35 and upwards and you can definitely tell from these prices...THEY ARE NOT REAL :).
Below is a video comparing the real watch to the fake watch. It seems the real watches have glass as the material to cover the watch, where the fake ones have a plastic covering on them over the face of the watch:
Looking for the genuine article? ICE Watches are sold on Amazon.co.uk by Ice themselves as no one else has permission to list them. Some models are listed below if interested in purchasing for that special someone:
Henry
