Challenge: a Five Watch Collection for £5,000

With such a plethora of timepieces available on the market today, I thought it might be good fun to set a little challenge… I decided to try and come up with a 5-watch collection that could be acquired for £5,000. To make this a little more difficult, I set ourselves a few ground rules to work within:

Rule 1: all watch values must be list price; and

Rule 2: the collection must comprise of a diver, a pilot, a chronograph, a dress piece, and an everyday watch – this could also be the wildcard of the bunch! It seems easy, right? Well… think again!

When I started this, I honestly thought it would be quite a simple task. Five watches that cost – on average – £1,000 each… it sounds so straightforward on the surface of it. However, as soon as you start delving into the world of watches in this price range, there is such a colossal array of pieces available that it is easy to head down the rabbit hole and while away far too many hours. Not to mention the time then spent weighing up £20 here and £60 there, offsetting prices to come in under – and as close to – the £5,000 target as possible once you have harvested a shortlist from your findings!

To begin with, I will walk you through my thought process… knowing full well that it may be far from ideal, and many of you may have other approaches you come up with!
I started by trying to come up with ‘target brands’ that I thought might be a good fit for the category.

Dive Watch

I started by looking at brands such as Seiko and Christopher Ward amongst a few others, both offering some great dive watches for £1,000 or less – which also might save me some precious pounds down the line! I also looked at slightly pricier options such as Longines and Oris just in case I ended up with extra to spend at the end, too. Each of these brands consists of pieces that are ballpark £1,000, which also offer a strong value proposition for what you spend and the timepieces themselves. Seiko Prospex offers a fantastic collection of diving pieces – there aren’t many places you can pick up an automatic diving watch with horological significance and credibility as with Seiko, and so a few of these were immediate additions to the shortlist. You can check out Seiko’s sports collection here.

Both Oris and Longines are well established brands with some really great pieces, both of which have a great offering for dive watches as well. I ended up with Oris Aquis in my shortlist, of which there are many to choose from, as well as a Longines Hydroconquest. With Christopher Ward’s Trident collection of dive watches, there is a wealth of different options and so it proved quite bountiful in terms of finding pieces for this challenge! Included in this are even some COSC certified divers for under £1,000 – which in terms of bang for your buck I think is right up there. Again, there were a couple of Christopher Ward Tridents in my shortlist – check out the collection here and you can see for yourself what I mean!

Pilot Watch

I decided to take the same approach when looking for a pilot watch. The reason for challenging to choose different styles of timepieces is to try and deliberately introduce variety into the final collection. As such, I wanted to try and find a pilot piece that stood out from others. One brand I know that has a pretty distinctive style, especially with aviation pieces, is the American brand Hamilton. Of course, many aviation inspired pieces will include a chronograph as a matter of course, but I decided I wanted a non-chronograph aviation piece to avoid doubling up on complications when I later selected a chronograph. Hamilton’s Khaki Aviation collection offers a great number of pieces, the majority of which are automatic calibres and £1,000 or less. A couple of these made the shortlist, along with an Oris Big Crown ProPilot piece which I absolutely adored. You can take a look at the Hamilton Khaki Aviation collection here.

Chronograph teaser

I will let you in on a little secret… I already had my heart set on a particular chronograph as I think it has a great story behind it. So, in reality by now I am already half way there, with the last 2 deliberations being over a dress watch and my everyday/wildcard piece. More on this chronograph in a minute!

Dress watch

I have somewhat of a penchant for dress watches personally, and so this one was most definitely a longlist rather than a shortlist with six different pieces in play. These included: my favourite Christopher Ward piece; a classic looking Tudor 1926 (you can pick these up for just under £1,500); an absolutely stunning Baume et Mercier Classima piece with quartz calibre; another Oris (can you tell I like Oris yet?); a first appearance for Rado with a Couple classic piece with a stunning blue dial; and a beautiful looking Seiko with brown dial and leather strap on a gold coloured case. Baume et Mercier is one brand that I believe offers a truly fantastic value proposition, with real heritage having been around since 1830. For a dress watch I highly recommend the Classima collection, which you can find here.

Everyday / Wildcard

My final deliberation was for an everyday wear watch. But what is this exactly…a daily beater? Something you could wear in any situation? Or, something that is more hard-wearing? Realistically, it could be any of these things, and so I started to think of this more as a wildcard piece that would fall into one of these categories. As such, you can imagine it was quite the varied shortlist! Some of the brands from other sections had representation here too, including Longines, Seiko, Christopher Ward and Rado, along with two others in Bamford and Nomos Glasshütte which made their first appearances on the shortlist.

Given this category is somewhat of a wildcard, some of the overarching reasons they were in my shortlist are as follows: Bamford offered a cushion shaped mechanical GMT complication (something I didn’t yet have) for just over £1,000, which I thought was decent value and something different from any others; the Nomos I thought was a fantastic looking piece and was something I could easily see myself wearing considerably often; the Rado True is a wholly ceramic piece, including ceramic strap, which for a little over £1,000 offered an unrivalled longevity in terms of resistance to knocks and scratches… you can find more about the Rado True collection here.

Chronograph revealed!

As mentioned earlier, I had a go-to already in mind for this from the outset… the Bulova Lunar Pilot is also known as the Bulova Moonwatch – providing somewhat of a significant clue as to its heritage! In fact, it was Commander Dave Scott, an astronaut piloting the Apollo 15 spacecraft which in 1971 went to the moon. Legend has it that Scott wore his own personal Bulova timepiece after his NASA issued Speedmaster became damaged. The modern incarnations of the Bulova Moonwatch are priced at just less than £500, with a high frequency (and thus highly accurate) quartz movement, which all up offers tremendous value in my opinion, making it an easy choice for me!

Five Watches for £5000

So with a shortlist that had amassed 24 watches to be whittled down to only 5, next up was the somewhat infuriating task of finding five that I liked together which totalled as close to £5,000 as possible, penny-pinching and swapping strap options to squeeze every last penny of budget! This took a lot longer than anticipated, but resulted in the following final five…