140 to 40: The Data Knew Before I Did

A note before we start. This one is by request. A good number of you, on the blog and in the letter, asked me to lay out the decision process behind the 140-to-40 cut before I get to the next piece, the one on lessons from years of buying and owning. Fair enough. Those lessons don't land until you know how I got to forty in the first place. Huge shoutout to Pierre C, whose email thread led straight to this one and sharpened a lot of what follows. So here's the how. The lessons come next.

I work in an office full of Apple Watches. A couple of Garmins. The boldest mechanical piece in the building belongs to a woman a few doors down wearing a two-tone Datejust, and the guys who care top out at an Omega ‘57. Then there's me.

My company culture is quietly allergic to noticeable watches. For years I treated that as a constraint on what I could get away with wearing. It turned out to be information about who I am.

When I decided to cut my collection from 140 watches to 40, I assumed the hard part would be ranking them. Best movement, best finishing, best backstory. It wasn't. The hard part was admitting that "best" and "mine" are fundamentally different questions, and that the room I sit in every day had already answered the second one.

Start with the 140. As mentioned previously, I don't regret a single one, because owning that many watches is the only education that sticks. You can read about a brand forever. Strap it on for a month and it tells you something the forums or Reddit can't. Across those 140 I built serious depth in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, a strong bench of microbrands clustered around Asia and Europe, and a scattering from the rest of Europe and the States.

Then the data, because with me, data wins. I track wear time across two apps, OnMyWrist and WristTrack. I didn't need either one to tell me what I reach for. But seeing it ranked, in numbers, over 469 recorded days, takes away the part of you that wants to negotiate. Three watches sat at the top of their categories and would not move.

Mainstream: the Rolex Daytona 126500LN, the Panda. Microbrand: the Marin Instruments Skin-Diver in Taupe. Independent: the Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF Minute Rattrapante.

Three price points, three corners of the watch world, and the same wrist under all of them. None of them shouts. Each is obvious only to the person who already knows. I didn't pick those three on purpose. My wrist picked them, every morning, for a year and a half, and it kept voting for an idea I hadn't named yet.

So I tried to name it. One day I woke up and I made a list of ten watches I don't own but would buy tomorrow, and I handed it to ChatGPT and Claude with one question. Who owns these watches, and what creative direction do they share? I wasn't fishing for recommendations. I wanted a read on myself, run through the watches I wanted most. This was inspired by a close buddy who was doing personality profiles using the LLMs.

Both came back with the same two words: understated luxury.

That phrase did something. The luxury half I already knew about. I've never had much of an ego, but I've always liked nice things. As a kid I had a knack for walking into a store and reaching for the single most expensive item on the shelf without knowing the price. The understated half was what the office had been teaching me for years. Put them together and you get a man who wants the good stuff and wants nobody to notice. That is me on my wrist.

Then I checked it against my want list, and that closed the argument. The watches I wanted next were the Cartier Tortue Monopoussoir from the CPCP, the Laurent Ferrier Classic Moon Silver, and a vintage Rolex GMT-Master 1675. I have since bought all three. Every one of them is understated luxury, and the watch press reaches for that exact phrase when it writes about brands like Laurent Ferrier, with no prompting from me.

So both halves of my collecting brain agreed. The watches I wore most and the watches I wanted next were arguing for the same thesis. The data and the heart came to the same thesis.

With the thesis in hand, I ran all 140 through three questions.

One. Does it fit understated luxury? If yes, it earned a closer look. If no, it had to justify itself another way. I kept a few rule-breakers on purpose, because a collection with zero exceptions isn't a point of view. It's a uniform.

Two. Has it gone unworn for 60 days, and why? The why matters more than the streak. A watch I love but save for the right moment is not the same as a watch I avoid and won't admit it. The first one stays. The second was already gone. I just hadn't filed the paperwork. I had a bunch of microbrands in this category that felt right at the time of purchase but I just never wore them once received.

Three. Do I own too many of one brand? This is where the cuts went deep. Seiko, Grand Seiko, Fears, Studi0 Underd0g, and a few others had stacked up without my noticing. Owning six of something doesn't make you a collector of it. It makes you a person who kept saying yes. I kept the ones that earned their slot and let the duplicates go.

Forty watches is still a lot of watches. This was never about minimalism. It was about getting the collection to say one thing instead of a hundred and forty things at the same time. 

The cut surprised me. I expected it to feel like a loss. Contrarily, it felt like I had focus. The forty that made it through all point the same direction, which means the next watch has a standard to clear instead of a hole to fill.

Now where do we go from here? Well, I imagine that 40 number will come down over time, but exactly what time horizon that will be is unknown.

Darren MLCW