Building your watch collection: where to start?

We often buy our first beautiful watch on a whim. Then a second, and the desire for a collection emerges. Here are a few guidelines for building one with coherence.

The main families of watches

• The everyday watch: versatile, robust, easy to read. It can be worn at the office or on the weekend.
• The dress watch: slim, understated, often on a leather strap, for special occasions.
• The diving watch: waterproof, with a rotating bezel, for summer and water activities.
• The chronograph: sporty and automotive spirit.
• The travel watch: GMT or world time, to track two time zones.

Start with three watches

An everyday watch, a dress watch, and a sports watch cover most situations. This is a solid foundation, which can then be enriched according to your tastes.

Vary the pleasures

A collection becomes more interesting when it mixes styles, dial colors, straps, and movements. A manual-winding mechanism, for example, brings a daily ritual that an automatic does not offer.

Organizing your collection over time

• 1 to 3 watches: a watch case or a small box.
• 3 to 10 watches: a watch box, with one or two empty slots for the future.
• Several automatic watches worn alternately: a watch winder, to keep them on time.
• A large collection: a display case to show them off, a watch winder for the automatic watches.

To find the right case for your collection, read our guide Choosing the right case.