The Haves and Have Nots of Watch Collecting

Just like everything in life watch collecting has its haves and have nots. The watch industry ranges from watches starting under ten dollars to well into the millions. One thing all these watches have in common is the ability to tell time, the way they go about it can be completely different though.

When I first started collecting watches in my early 20s, there was not the huge variety of microbrands we see today. Without the huge offering of quality affordable watches and without social media showing how much there is to choose from, I ended up getting an Omega Seamaster GMT as my first watch I bought for myself. I probably over extended myself to get the two or three thousand dollar watch, but honestly the only other cheaper options known to me were either department store watches or something like a Timex or Seiko.

What followed was a snowballing of luxury timepieces that pretty much put me squarely into the snobby side of the hobby. It happened gradually with my next watch pick up being an Omega Planet Ocean followed by an IWC GST Chronograph Automatic, funny enough I just picked up an IWC GST Aquatimer 2000 over 20 years later…



When I built the website and helped start up a watch resale business around 2005 things really got bad. All of a sudden I was around all the newest and most sought after watches from all of the top brands. I quickly found that my favorite watch was the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore and pretty much refused to wear anything else.

At this time there really wasn’t any reason to own a personal watch because we had so many pre-owned pieces on hand that I could wear anytime. The watches I was wearing were miles above my pay grade, but I just considered them commonplace. Over the next decade plus I kind of had a falling out with watches even though I was still supporting the watch business I helped start, but I just wasn’t around watches anymore and really had no interest in them.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I caught the watch bug again, but it was probably after all the YouTube videos started to come out about the daily lives of watch dealers. Now I’m sitting here with no watches to my name and have a real interest in them again. Naturally it’s time to buy a watch, but what to buy?



We had just moved from Austin to a smaller town about an hour west where we had just finished a gut renovation of a large one hundred year old house as well as an even older building on the town square that we turned in a brewpub. Needless to say, money wasn’t super available, so I had to bring down my expectations of a Royal Oak Offshore or bust.

During this time I had also really got into sneakers and streetwear. One of my favorite brands was a Japenese brand called Neighborhood. Neighborhood was about to release a limited edition watch with Seiko, so I knew I had to get one, especially with my new found love of watches. My Japanese friend was a bit too slow to get the watch on release, so I bought a resale one on Chrono24.

I was super excited to get the watch, but when it showed up it just didn’t click with me. The case while large in diameter wore small due to hidden lugs. After trying to wear it a few times, it just felt too small and I gave it to my wife. So that didn’t scratch my watch itch, so what was up next?



I had always been a fan of IWC and their Big Pilot and Aquatimer in particular. I even asked my wife to marry me wearing an original reference Big Pilot in New York. The watch site I was still supporting had a Big Pilot Top Gun in stock and I asked them if I could have it. Having been integral to starting the company and having never asked for anything, I thought it was an acceptable ask. The owner agreed and a day later a box showed up. Well the Big Pilot wasn’t in the box, but a Top Gun 46mm Chronograph was. Now this is a great watch, I even bought it again a few years later…, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I’m sad to say at even over 40 I threw a fit. I got used to the watch, but I eventually sold it and acquired a Big Pilot Heritage. Things after that just kind of fell into place for me collecting wise and my wife and I now have decent collections including my grail watches of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Montoya and an IWC Big Pilot Top Gun Perpetual Calendar. The brands in our collection consist of Audemars Piguet, Rolex, Hublot, IWC and JLC. I’m also looking to add a Blancpain 500 Fathoms, so I guess Blancpain will be in the mix as well here rather soon.

So yeah, typical watch snob brands and it doesn’t seem like I’ve really advanced much into having an open mind for other non old money brands. Can you really blame me though, these are really the only type of watches I’ve been exposed to over two decades of collecting and being in the industry. Well this is where things were about to change.

When I started Hourstriker, I really didn’t want to only cover the ten or so big brands that I was super familiar with, but wanted to cover just about everything. After spending a decent amount of time compiling a list of brands to add to the site, I had a starting number of around 225 brands. Naturally I had heard of a decent number of these brands, but there were tons I had never heard of. Even of the brands I was familiar with, for most I hadn’t really spent any time with their watches on my wrist.



Initially we were not reviewing watches on Hourstriker, more just creating a large knowledge base of brands, models, terms and covering new releases. Reading about and looking at pictures really doesn’t do much in terms of letting you get to know a brand and their watches though.

When I had the harebrained idea to start asking brands to send us watches to review, I really didn’t think many if any would agree. Well now as I’m sitting here with a backlog of watches to review, I find that I was pretty much wrong about how welcoming brands would be to us. Back in the day I was constantly around tons of super interesting watches, but this was different. I was now getting brand new releases in from sometimes brands I’d never have even known about.

Part of our review process is to spend as much time with a watch as we can. This means wearing the watch out to dinner and drinks, running errands or going to trips. While we’re still small and I’m solely responsible for the watch reviews, it means I typically only get a few days to a week or two with any given watch. Still during the time I spend with a watch, I treat it as mine and wear it as I would any watch in my personal collection.



We have a few five figure watches in our personal collection and this is typically the range of watch that I’m most accustomed to. So wearing a rose gold Freak X from Ulysse Nardin or a rose gold PanoMaticCalendar from Glashutte Original is right in my wheelhouse. Now when things started to get interesting is when I’m all of a sudden wearing a sub $500 watch from Nodus or a $1,000 watch from Christopher Ward.

I now find myself spending a lot of time with microbrand watches analyzing and testing them, as well as wearing them. It’s starting to become very clear to me that you can get a tremendous amount of watch for very little money. I guess I used to feel that watches that didn’t cost $5,000 plus just weren’t good watches. Either they had terrible inaccurate movements or the cases and finishing were garbage. To be honest though, I haven’t come across a less expensive watch I’d say any of that about.

Often what sets apart a microbrand’s watch from something much more expensive from a large manufacturer is the movement. Typically microbrands use off the shelf movements while the bigger guys spend tons of time and money developing their own calibers. Now there is great art and tradition in making your own movement, but in raw performance and accuracy I’ve been seeing that off the shelf calibers are offering the same if not better results than their much more expensive in-house counterparts.



The numerous houses my wife and I have owned have never been from a custom homebuilder, besides our old house that we fully renovated, every house has been part of a neighborhood and for better terms mass produced with a few other similar houses being in the neighborhood. One of my good friends as well as my sister both have multimillion dollar houses built by custom homebuilders that have been nothing but trouble for them. Now when you think about it and compare a mass produced off the shelf movement to a tract home and an in-house caliber to a custom built home, you can kind of see where I’m going.

Like the tract home, the off the shelf movement has been produced over and over to infinity and every little issue that could come up with the movement has been dealt with long before you have to deal with anything. Now the in-house caliber, just like the custom home hasn’t been built over and over and is relatively new and just for that particular watch’s needs. That just means there is no possible way for the in-house caliber to be run through the endless tests and iterations the mass produced movement has, opening the door for accuracy and quality control issues to creep in.

As I’m typing this my IWC Big Pilot Top Gun Perpetual Calendar is sitting on a timegrapher while I’m trying to figure out why it’s losing 30 minutes overnight even though it runs +5 seconds per day. This watch carried a retail price of $36,000 and houses IWC’s in-house 7 day movement with an in-house perpetual calendar module. Now I needed a watch to sync up with the Big Pilot for testing and I ended up using a $1,990 Laco Frankfurt GMT I just reviewed that I had at my desk, which houses a mass produced Sellita movement inside. It’s funny the watch I’m using as reference costs multiples less than the IWC and uses a mass produced movement.



Also just a few months ago the crown on my Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Montoya broke and would no longer screw in. This is a known issue with Royal Oaks and Offshores of the time, so now after a very long repair wait and large bill, I am so careful when operating and especially screwing in the crown. I basically treat the watch like it’s made out of glass every time I have to set the time. Remember this was a watch that was once trading at near $60,000 in the peak of Offshore madness.

So does that mean I’m going to liquidate our watch collection and laugh all the way to the bank wearing our microbrand watches? Absolutely not… like I said earlier I’m currently looking for a Blancpain 500 Fathoms, so what gives?

Well first of all some of the watches in our collection have certain sentimental value to us. For example the Offshore Montoya was the watch I had pretty much wanted the entire time I’d seriously been in the watch business. Just being able to acquire one was something I wasn’t sure I was ever going to be able to achieve. Even if it’s fairly fragile and long periods of time go between it being worn, it’s still a watch I will never sell. Fun fact, I do prefer the titanium version which I own, but I did get married wearing the rose gold version of the Montoya.

The Big Pilot Top Gun Perpetual Calendar also means a ton to me. I’ve been obsessed with the Big Pilot since its original release and getting engaged while wearing one will be something I’ll always remember. I also met up with John Mayer in Las Vegas back in the mid 2000s to possibly buy his titanium limited edition Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar long before he was the watch celebrity he is today. So having a very similar watch is kind of cool to me, especially since it’s the pinnacle of the Big Pilot collection I love so much.



So besides the personal connections to some of these watches, why do I still keep and seek out these seemingly overpriced other “luxury” watches in our collection. Well to this day I still believe the IWC GST Aquatimer 2000 in titanium is the best divers watch ever produced. It has an incredible 2000 meter water resistance while being thin, is very lightweight being created out of titanium, has an integrated titanium bracelet (also I have the rubber strap for it) and has a timeless design language. If you look at the new titanium Rolex Yacht-Master, you can see tons of DNA from the GST Aquatimer 2000 in it.

The IWC Top Gun Chronograph IW388001 that I so hated when it arrived years ago as a reward to helping start a really successful business… I ended up selling and really started missing it, so I ended up picking up another at a price too good to pass up. For the price I bought it for, it makes the perfect daily watch. The sizing is great, the case is made of in vogue ceramic meaning it won’t scratch and it even offers an in-house flyback chronograph movement. After pairing it with a rubber strap the watch is a great do anything watch.

Finally the Blanpcain 500 Fathoms… although you can pick one up significantly lower than its $26,500 retail price, it’s still a crazy amount of money to spend on a watch meant to do extreme diving with. Just like how I’m starting to learn more about the various microbrands from starting Hourstriker, I’m also starting to get greater appreciation for such watches as the Fifty Fathoms. I’ve always known about the collection, but really didn’t know how important it was in the landscape of modern timepieces and trends. The 500 Fathoms is just the “king” and most out there version of the Fifty that is wearable.

Now do we wear these watches to impress others? Not at the least, nobody knows what I’m wearing ever. My wife’s Rolex Yacht-Master 16622 and to less extent her Hublot Big Bang All Black 41 and my Offshore Montoya might be the only watches any non-watch person could recognize, the Big Bang and Offshore purely off of their case shape only.



The reason we own and wear them is that WE know what they are. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but I get the same feeling when I review something like an Ulysse Nardin Freak X or Diver X. I know just how much effort was put into creating these watches and the heritage of the brands. They’re basically just art you can wear on your wrist. Do I expect them to be dead accurate to 0 seconds per day in all positions, of course not.

I think having spent 20 years in the watch industry I see more niche higher end watches as temperamental and their quirks add to their allure. Of course brands like Rolex and Omega can produce a high end timepiece that is dead on accurate and will last forever, but once again like off the shelf Sellita and ETA movements, Rolex and Omega movements are mass produced taking out most of the chance of any issues coming up. I kind of see owning other non mass produced high end watches like owning a modified older sports car, meaning there is always a risk of something going wrong, but if treated right they do offer something un-matched and visceral when firing on all cylinders. Just expect something to go wrong and budget service into the cost of ownership.

Would I own a microbrand watch personally? Of course I would. I know there is a train of thought out there that it’s normal to only wear your most expensive watch. For me, that is not true, the Big Pilot Perpetual and Offshore Montoya are my least worn watches. The Top Gun Chrono and GST Aquatimer get the most wrist time in my collection and cost fractions of what the other two cost. This leads me to believe that I could happily insert a microbrand watch into my collection and have it get considerable wrist time.



Personally I never dress up, but I’m sure there will be occasions that I need to and it would be nice to have a dress watch. I would rather spend “real” watch money on a sports watch or diver, so something like the Christopher Ward Bel Canto we just got in for review would be a perfect candidate for a dress watch for me. It’s not super inexpensive, but it’s a lot less than offerings from the more established brands in the dress watch space.

Watches like the Formex Essence Leggera and Norqain Wild ONE offer great value for your dollar being made out of full carbon and offering a real GADA watch for $2,000 to $5,000. While not cheap, once again they are a fraction of what a carbon watch from a more established brand would cost, and I really enjoyed my time with both of them.

If somebody didn’t care about dive watches like I don’t about dress watches, I’d say something from Squale would offer such value and heritage as an alternative to say a Rolex Submariner or Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. For just over $1,000 you get a more than capable dive watch with 600 meters of water resistance from a brand who was a pioneer in early dive watches (cases) like Rolex and Blancpain were.



One thing I have to mention about microbrands is the issue when the snob factor pokes out its ugly head. You see a lot of non-AMG Mercedes and non-M BMW’s around, which are cars pretty much only bought for brand recognition since they don’t offer much more than a similar sized and specced Korean car would. I’m guilty of this as well, and this purely isn’t from a money standpoint when it comes to watches. We were at a nice resort and I was wearing a diver from a newer microbrand while there were tons of nicer watches around. I felt a bit weird being the “watch guy” and having something on my wrist that really didn’t have much of a story attached to it, say like a Fifty Fathoms. While the watch performed perfectly as a diver and handled getting wet with no issue, it just felt a bit flat in a social setting with non-watch people.

I guess the whole point of this massive rant is that just being more expensive doesn’t mean a watch is better than a much cheaper one. In many cases the cheaper watch will probably have a more accurate and reliable movement. As for the functions of being a watch, it’s really hard nowadays to say a $25,000 diver will outperform even a $500 diver. There is just a lot more than goes along with that more expensive watch in terms of history, importance and that weird bit of romance you can’t put your finger on. Of course when you start talking about very high complications, there just aren’t cheaper versions to compare, so you have to pay to play.



I personally would never recommend going out and spending insane amounts of money on a first watch. I think microbrands offer a great alternative to getting into watch collecting and even figuring what type and size of watch you even like. When I first started I thought I liked watches on bracelets, and now I hate them for example. When you’ve been a collector for a few years and start developing a passion and direction, then it’s probably time to look at more expensive and important pieces.

Looking back being the strapped for cash college student... If I had the wealth of knowledge at my fingertips that we have today and there were as many available quality brands as there are today, I believe I would probably have ended up going with something like a Christopher Ward Twelve or Squale Matic as my first watch. Both offer exactly what I like in a watch for around $1,000. Also the Seamaster I bought as my first watch is now way more expensive than it was in the early 2000s, putting it way out of budget.