Issue 215: How not to spend £25,000 on a watch
It turns out there are very few good answers to this extremely first-world problem
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that, a little while ago, took to social media asking for inspiration. Among the many ideas suggested was “what’s the best watch for £25,000?”. I dismissed it as a non-starter, because, duh, there are loads of great watches for twenty-five big ones, and besides, who needs me to tell them that? The thought sat down and made itself comfortable in a temporarily unused corner of my mind, however, and when I could ignore it no longer I engaged it in conversation to find that actually, it is a lot less obvious than it sounded. I would now go so far as to say this is actually a bad budget for buying a new watch, which is the kind of thing that sounds just terrible taken out of context. But if this is your world - and you’re here, so it kind of is - then I think you’ll be surprised by how right I am.
Or you’ll disagree strongly, in which case I will be only too happy to see what gems I have overlooked. To the comments section!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Can you buy a great watch for £25,000?
Yes. But it’s much easier to buy a pretty average one.
If this sounds ridiculous, let me explain.
Firstly, there are great watches at almost all budgets, for a given definition of ‘great’, and if the idea of spending £25,000 on a watch isn’t for you, I would steer you towards my piece from a couple of months ago on the best watches for £5,000. I don’t take lightly what this amount of money can mean to people; my first proper (i.e. postgraduate) job paid less than this and that was only 15 years ago.
It might have made sense to look at £10,000 next, but I think I’d be here all day. Although the goalposts keep moving, that is still a brilliant budget to buy any number of watches for life. If you’re buying for £25k, you are not a saver making a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. You are already up to your waist, at least, in the waters of watch collecting, and the kind of guidance you need is very different. You may not think you need any, and I respect that. This is simply my attempt to find value in a somewhat neglected market segment.
Maybe that also sounds odd. Watches are getting stupidly expensive, we all know that, so surely there are hundreds of ways to blow 25 grand? Indeed there are, and we’ll look at a few. At the risk of sounding like a YouTuber, there is one type of watch I would almost never recommend, and this price bracket is riddled with them.
In fact, the more I looked, the more I realised that this is an arid desert of value compared to spending almost any other amount of money. Something interesting is going on with mainstream brands in particular and I’ve given a little time to thinking about why that might be.
A little bit of housekeeping: when I do these fantasy shopping challenges, I assume everything is available at retail price. Some watches mentioned below definitely aren’t, but others could be had with a discount, or found in the secondary market as-new for a chunky markdown. This keeps it fair, albeit theoretical, and lets us talk about where brands think they are placing their watches rather than where they actually end up. I will look at some pre-owned and vintage watches at the end, as well.
Other criteria: I always shop as close to the total budget as I can, but I allow for the fact that you might well let temptation run away with you in the moment, which means an actual window of £22,000 to £27,000, roughly ten per cent above and below.
So, shall we begin?
