If I’m looking back at 2025, it feels like the year I really embraced independent brands across price points. If you’ve listened to the podcast, talked to me at a watch event, or read between the lines of many of the articles I’ve written over the last few years, you’ll know that I’ve become increasingly bored with “big” brands and the new watches they push out to market on predictable release cycles, year in and year out.
2025 was the year that that boredom and frustration really made an impact on the purchases I decided to make. I won’t lie: I went a little overboard on new watches last year. Not having children, owning a car that’s fully paid off, and living in a world where retail therapy is often the most reliable form of comfort will do that to you. In the last year, I picked up new watches from Ming, Otsuka Lotec, Arcanaut, Louis Erard, Selten, Typsim, Christopher Ward, Nomos, and Arken. I’m happy to say that every single one of them is a little weird (Or special? Maybe that’s a better word.) and I’m very pleased to say that in just about every case I have some personal connective tie to the brand or the people behind it. That’s a thing that has become almost essential to me as I consider a new watch: I want to know the people who made it, understand their philosophy, and, if I can, develop an ongoing relationship with them. That’s a goal that’s easier to meet now than ever given the ease with which we all connect on social media, at watch meetups, and elsewhere.
When I look at my collection today, I see a lot of really fun and interesting watches that have been released in a cluster of the last three years or so. That’s a little bit jarring for me, honestly, as someone who has always held the belief that watches should be thought of as “forever” items and not bought in a fever of new release hysteria. Reader, I admit it, I’ve bought some watches over these last few years in new release hysteria, letting go of pieces that I’ve had for years in the process to make room. I’ll need to slow that down this year for sure if I ever want to retire (lol), but it also speaks to a long term collecting goal of organizing my collection around pieces that feel timeless.
Right now, I admit, I’m a little over indexed on the new and trendy. Ming and Otsuka Lotec, for example, are both incredible brands and I love the watches I own from both of them, but they are of the moment in a very specific way. That’s not to say, of course, that we won’t be talking about both of these brands in ten, twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years (well, I certainly won’t be talking about them in a hundred years). But if the idea of a watch as a thing that is stable and true through time is appealing, picking up anything that feels like the focus of the algorithm at the current moment feels like a risk.
Then again, maybe there’s something to the idea of fully embracing the moment? My Otsuka Lotec is distinctive and incredibly recognizable, and if that’s the watch that becomes most associated with me by friends and family and colleagues, it will reflect, in a sense, a certain solidifying of a collecting perspective at a particular moment in my life. I hit my early 40s, and decided to embrace this rather than sink that same money into something more generic. That’s not a bad lens through which to interpret how I look at these things. It is, in fact, fairly accurate.
Still, as 2026 begins, I’m seeking to be more thoughtful about what pieces I add to the collection. I’m not saying I won’t add any brand new watches (meaning, 2026 releases) to the collection this year, but I’d like to explore watches from earlier time periods. Not vintage, exactly, but watches that have been on my radar from the 1990s and early 2000s, including some from big brands (I still have a great fondness for Zenith watches from the Thierry Nataf period, for example). There’s also a world of great independent watches from this era that are of interest as well.
I also suspect that at some point I might need to cull the herd and sell some watches off to obtain whatever comes next. This is where the stress comes in. I’ve been better over these last few years at selecting watches that I really love and know that I’ll continue to love before pulling the trigger. This is just a function of developing taste, a process that takes years, but never really ends. So when I look at my collection, it’s hard to pick out anything I’d be interested in cutting loose in the abstract. That could all change pretty dramatically of course if the right watch came around, but it feels like the percentage of “keepers” in the collection is higher than ever. That is, objectively, a very good thing, and perhaps portends the strongest signal of all: that it’s OK to slow down in 2026.
Zach Kazan
2026-01-07 20:00:00