Maybe I’m Thinking About Independent Watches All Wrong

I’ve been debating whether to write this, which is usually a tell. The pieces I hesitate on tend to be the ones where I don’t have a clean answer, and lately I’ve been trying to make sense of the independent watchmaker world as a relative outsider looking in. I have friends who have gone all the way down the rabbit hole, serious collections, serious conviction—and it’s the kind of conviction that makes you wonder if you’re the one missing something. Because from where I sit, I’m still trying to figure out where to even start.

The tension shows up pretty quickly. Independent watchmakers are pricing watches at levels that sit right alongside the establishment: Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, Breguet, and in many cases, buy-in starts around 60,000 CHF and only goes up from there. That’s real money. That’s the kind of purchase you sit with, revisit, and try to justify from a few different angles before pulling the trigger.

If you try to evaluate this rationally, it gets uncomfortable pretty quickly. Most watches, even from the great maisons, don’t appreciate. The vast majority depreciate, with only a handful of outliers that manage to break through and trade above MSRP. For every one or two that do, there are hundreds that don’t. Independents add another layer of uncertainty on top of that baseline reality. You’re not just buying a watch... you’re underwriting a brand, a person, and a future that hasn’t been written yet. There’s no deep secondary market, no decades-long track record, and no guarantee that the brand will even exist in ten years. If you force this into a traditional “investment” framework, it starts to look less like a calculated decision and more like a gamble.

Which is where I kept getting stuck, until I started to consider that maybe this is the wrong framework entirely.

I read a piece recently from KingFlum over at ScrewDownCrown that helped this click into place. He references the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and a simple but slightly uncomfortable idea: humans are wired to deceive themselves—not as a flaw, but as a feature. The logic is that if you truly believe your own reasoning, you become much better at convincing others that your decisions are rational. Applied to watches, it hits close to home. We tell ourselves we’re buying craftsmanship, heritage, finishing, and those things are real, they do matter, but they may not be the full story. As he lays out, we’re often running a more sophisticated program, one where genuine appreciation and status signaling can coexist without us fully acknowledging the second part.

That idea is uncomfortable, but it’s also clarifying. It suggests that the issue isn’t that independent watchmakers are irrational. It’s that we’re trying to apply a purely rational lens to something that was never built to be evaluated that way in the first place. In other words, the friction isn’t in the category... it’s in how we’re choosing to think about it.

Stepping back, there’s also something broader going on in the industry. For decades, watchmaking consolidated, with groups like Richemont and LVMH building portfolios of brands, scaling distribution, and professionalizing the entire ecosystem. That playbook worked, and in many ways still does. But now you’re seeing a countercurrent at the edges. A new generation of watchmakers, many of whom trained inside those same maisons, are stepping out and building something of their own. They’ve learned the craft at the highest level, seen how the machine works, and decided to take a different path.

At the same time, the buyer is changing. There’s a growing desire not just for product, but for proximity...for a story, a connection, a sense of knowing the person behind the object. Independents deliver that in a way the big houses simply can’t. You can talk to the founder, understand the design decisions, and follow the journey in real time. That kind of access changes the nature of ownership. It turns the watch into something more than an object—it becomes a relationship.

Layer in the current market dynamics, and the picture sharpens further. We’re living in a K-shaped economy where the high end continues to perform, the middle feels increasingly squeezed, and the low end holds its own, often driven by microbrands delivering strong value for the dollar, like Christopher Ward, Baltic, and Serica. Independents sit in a different lane altogether. They’re not competing on value or scale; they’re competing on originality, craft, and point of view. And at least for now, the high end of the market seems willing to support that.

The open question is whether that support is durable. There are more independent watchmakers than I can remember seeing before, and history across industries suggests what happens next: consolidation, attrition, and a handful of winners that come to define the category. Even groups like LVMH appear to be paying attention, building relationships and effectively placing small bets across the ecosystem. They don’t need all of them to succeed; they just need to be close to the ones that do.

All of this brings me back to a simpler, more personal question: what are you actually buying?

If I have $35,000 to spend and I’m choosing between a mainstream brand and an independent, the trade-offs become clearer. With the mainstream brand, you’re buying history, recognition, and a well-understood product. There’s a relatively liquid market, a shared language among collectors, and a sense of familiarity that makes the decision easier to justify. There’s comfort in that structure.

With an independent, it’s something else entirely. You’re buying access, authorship, and a direct line to the person behind the watch. You’re buying into a specific interpretation of craft, along with all the uncertainty that comes with it. Some of these brands won’t be around in a decade, and interestingly, I’m not sure that’s a negative. A watch from a brand that no longer exists doesn’t automatically lose meaning; in some cases, it gains it. It becomes a snapshot of a moment, a piece of a story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

That’s not how we’re typically trained to think about value, but it might be a more honest way to think about collecting.

Where I’ve landed, at least for now, is fairly simple. If I’m trying to optimize purely for financial outcomes, there are better places to put capital than watches—independent or otherwise. So maybe that’s not the job. Maybe the job is to build a collection that reflects taste, curiosity, and a point of view. On that axis, independent watchmakers deserve a very real look.

If you put a $35,000 independent next to a $35,000 mainstream piece, I’m not automatically defaulting to the brand name anymore. I like the idea of supporting someone building something. I like the idea of being closer to the source. I like the idea that the watch on my wrist isn’t just a product—it’s a conversation.

I don’t know how many of these independents will ultimately make it. History suggests not many will. But I’m increasingly comfortable with the idea that I don’t need to pick all the winners. I just need to pick the ones that I believe in. And if I’m being honest, that belief—like most things in this hobby—is probably doing a little more work behind the scenes than I realize.

That doesn’t make it wrong. If anything, it makes it human.