Vortic Watch Company cofounder and president R.T. Custer is recovering from a massive stroke, and his wife, Lindsay Roselle, is operating the Fort Collins, Colo.–based watchmaker business until he’s able to return.
Roselle tells JCK that Custer is “recovering well” both physically and mentally but is unlikely to resume work at Vortic anytime soon.
“He has lots of creative energy these days. He’s just not really able to spend much time on screens or in highly stimulating environments like our machine shop,” Roselle says in an email.
Custer experienced a stroke on June 30 while on a business trip in Detroit. At age 34, he was in good health and had no known medical conditions, Roselle said in an Aug. 28 post on Instagram.
“R.T. collapsed in the hotel gym that morning just eight minutes from a Level 1 trauma center and teaching hospital with world-class neurosurgeons. Thanks to the quick response of the hotel staff who recognized stroke symptoms, he was transported by ambulance, received clot-busting medication immediately, and then underwent emergency surgery where a neurosurgeon removed a clot that had blocked more than 90% of his right cerebral artery,” Roselle wrote in the Instagram post.
“We were told very plainly that if this had happened at home in Fort Collins, where this level of intervention isn’t available and a flight-for-life to Denver would have been required, the outcome would have been very different,” she continued.
On July 21, Roselle posted a video on Instagram about Custer’s ordeal that concludes with him walking out of rehab in Colorado with his sons. Roselle wrote that they “still don’t have a concrete diagnosis” about what caused the stroke. She described his recovery as “slow. But it’s happening.”
Roselle said in the Aug. 28 post that Custer “is mentally sharp, present, and himself.” Since the stroke, the couple had considered closing or selling Vortic but decided on “continuity,” with Roselle as interim CEO, she wrote.
“Doctors estimate at least 12 months before he can even consider working again, and 2–3 years before he can return to the intense demands of running his company,” says a GoFundMe page for the family (which has raised more than $88,000 to date).
Through social media, Vortic has asked its customers to keep supporting the company by purchasing from its ready-to-ship watch inventory as well as other merchandise.
The late-August Instagram update about Custer’s health also said that Vortic’s sister brand, Colorado Watch Company, had “encountered unexpected manufacturing challenges” and was working with an unnamed U.S. partner to fulfill all preorders in the coming weeks.
Vortic is known for salvaging and restoring antique American pocket watches and repurposing them as wristwatches. Custer founded the company in 2013 with Tyler Wolfe, funding much of its development through Kickstarter. They went through a long legal battle with Swatch Group, parent company of Hamilton, maker of some of the pocket watches Vortic has used in its wristwatches.
Wolfe is no longer with Vortic. Roselle tells JCK that Custer bought him out last November. Wolfe now works in Pennsylvania at another business.
Top: R.T. Custer in 2021, after his watch company Vortic prevailed in a legal battle with Swatch (photo courtesy of Vortic)
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