PHOENIX, Ariz. – When you’re sorting through your closet, you may stumble upon some trash and even a bit of treasure.
Once you sort through the items you want to keep, you may even consider donating what you don’t want.
A Phoenix man says you may want to take a closer look at what you are donating before you simply give it away.
“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 to me,” said Zach Norris.
When Norris walked into Goodwill, he found a rare 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre watch priced for $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. I was like, ‘You can scan it in my hand if you want to.’ I just didn’t want to let it go,” Norris said. “Sometimes, they just miss it, they don’t know. It’s not a very fancy-looking piece. You have to know what it is.”
A collector himself, Norris 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, it was exciting,” Norris said.
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,” said Norris.
After his find ended up on a watch collector’s website, a collector in San Francisco bought the watch for $35,000 and threw in a $4,000 Omega Speedmaster watch to sweeten the deal.
“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.”
Norris says he also donated some of his profits back to the Goodwill.
He also has some advice for anyone hoping to hit it big at the thrift store.
“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,” he said.