Searching for a watch is not merely the challenge to find a functional product. I read camera and computer reviews to get the best equipment for my needs. With watches, especially luxury watches, people aren’t buying mere utilitarian value. If you are looking for a “well-made watch that tells good time” you don’t need to spend more than about $100 – $200. People buy expensive watches because of the art, craftsmanship, and heritage. To appreciate each of those three qualities you must understand them first (education) and then you must find those aesthetics and styles which best suit your tastes (exposure). How, exactly, can someone via the internet deliver all that to you? They can’t. What I’m trying to say is that for better or worse, lots of hours of poking around and reading about watches online (or otherwise) is a more or less unavoidable prerequisite to choosing those watches which are best for you.

I also don’t like the idea of people trying to shortcut this process. People who buy “nice things” simply because they were validated by another person tend to have far less emotional attachment to those things. And that can lead to devaluing. This reminds me of my previous article on the various types of watch collectors where I ask people, “are you being influenced as a watch collector?” Buy what you like because you know why you like it. Don’t blindly trust anyone.

Watch Tastes Are Highly Subjective

Assuming I knew your specific needs and budget, I would still not want to venture and tell you what watch should sit on your wrist. That feels a lot like telling you who to marry. The art you choose to decorate your home is one degree of “personal.” The art you choose to actually wear is an even more advanced degree of “personal.” How on earth am I to know what tastes a stranger has? I’m barely able to predict the taste of those people who are close to me. Even aBlogtoWatch team members who have been offering me feedback on the watches they like for years continue to surprise me with the timepieces they choose to enjoy. Taste is thus highly subjective, and it is a fallacy to assume that someone else – especially someone remote – can read your mind. The best solution is to pay close attention to those watches which are conservative classics and decide if one of them is safe enough for your tastes. aBlogtoWatch covers those watches all the time, and we have various lists such as the Top 10 Living Legend Watches to help steer people in the right direction. With that said, such tools should be used for exposure, and anyone buying one of those watches should certainly know why.

In fact, I think people should be able to justify every single purchase they make. If someone asks you, “why did you buy that watch?” you should have a full speech practically prepared. Understanding your own tastes is an advanced way of being able to not only identify those things you like the most, but also to help you evolve and adapt as a collector and aficionado. See how getting an expert’s advice on what watch to buy defies that notion? Trust me, I’m sure my ego would get a big kick out of knowing that I placed watches on a number of wrists and that my actions were responsible for certain models I like being sold with greater frequency. With that said, I don’t share my passion for watches because I want to convince anyone that my way is the best way. I have my own tastes, and I’ve never told anyone they should like what I do simply because I feel as though I have honed knowledge.

Rather, I enjoy sharing my passion about the things I like and hope to find people who agrees with me or at the least find our discussions on this site useful in helping them to develop their own tastes and passions. Returning to the original topic, I will not tell you what watch to buy because I not only don’t know your taste and style, but also because I want you to discover your own watch tastes and style. If you aren’t prepared to do that, then save yourself the cost of buying a multi-thousand dollar timepiece that you won’t really care enough about.

Consulting Is Both Complicated And Time-Consuming

Last, let me finish off by saying that despite the obvious enormity of the time I spend dealing with watches, I’m pretty unavailable to help individual people with their watch buying needs. Asking me to help you buy a watch is akin to asking for consulting – most of which doesn’t come free. Back during the earlier years of aBlogtoWatch, some of the team toyed with the idea of offering a “watch buying service” where we help people find the right watch for them and take either some service fee or a commission from the retailer. I was always against this idea because I inherently knew that helping people to buy something where subjective taste is a factor is a hugely time-consuming endeavor. You don’t just get on a call with someone and ask them a few canned questions, but it is rather a drawn-out process of showing them watches, explaining watches, and then getting them to actually buy a watch. Honestly, if someone was good at it, it would still be a full-time job. Still, it doesn’t counter the above issues where I posit that the most enjoyable watch buying experiences are when the consumer makes the discovery and choice themselves.

I’m really quite busy, and as much as I would like to give each and every person a detailed one-on-one wrist watch education, I can’t. What I can do is spend the bulk of my time studying and traveling to see watches all over the world and then writing about them and my experiences. In fact, the irony of this entire discussion is that the entire point of aBlogtoWatch is to offer a blog/magazine-style approach to watch education and exposure. We have several thousand articles to read, which if you’ve been following along for a while should make up the bulk of the watch education that you need to make the best watch buying decisions for you. What more can we do?

So for all of you well-meaning to entirely selfish people out there asking for or demanding (it happens…) watch buying advice, we apologize in advance for not getting back to the most of you. Thanks for understanding the role we serve in the consumer watch education space, and by all means do feel free to send us a message, but don’t expect a response if you are asking for too much. In fact, my absolute favorite messages are those from audience members who have thanked us for helping them to discover and appreciate a watch that they just purchased (and subsequently enjoy). Those people do us proud.