I Spent $29,700 on Luxury Watches. Sixty Days Later, the Only One Still on My Wrist Cost $89.
Four of them are names you would recognise across a room. The fifth is not. I did not set out to write this, and the brands in this test are not going to enjoy it.
My job means I own more watches than any sensible person should. It also means people ask me the same question at dinner parties, and I have never had a good answer for it. How much do you actually have to spend before a watch stops feeling cheap?
Everyone assumes the number is high. I assumed it too. So this spring I put twenty nine thousand seven hundred dollars of watches on my desk, added one that cost less than a tank of fuel, and wore all five in rotation for sixty days. No bench tests. No spec sheets. Just which one I reached for when nobody was watching.
Four of the five are watches you already know. The fifth is one almost nobody had heard of when I started, made by a direct to consumer brand called ZEPH, and it costs less than the clasp on the Rolex.
I expected to spend this article explaining why you should save up for the real thing. That is not the article I ended up writing.
It was supposed to be the joke of the experiment. It finished first, and it was not close.
What I was actually measuring
Not build quality on a bench. Not resale value. Not heritage. Those things matter to collectors and they matter to me on a Sunday, but they are not what decides which watch you put on at seven in the morning when you are already late.
I measured three things. Whether I stopped noticing it on my wrist within a week. Whether I hesitated before wearing it somewhere it might get knocked. And whether it still looked the same on day sixty as it did on day one.
The price gap, drawn to scale
Before the results, look at what we are actually comparing. The bars below are proportional to price. The last one is not a rendering error.
Five watches in the test
Bar length is proportional to typical retail price.
Prices are typical retail at time of writing and are shown for comparison only. ZEPH is not affiliated with any of the other brands listed.
The results, worst to best
rubber strap
Hublot Classic Fusion
A watch designed to be looked at rather than worn. It photographs beautifully and it announces itself in a room, which turned out to be exactly the problem. In sixty days I wore it eleven times, and nine of those were because I had decided in advance that the evening called for it. A watch you have to plan around is a watch you do not really own.
integrated bracelet
Bulgari Octo Roma
Genuinely one of the most interesting case designs in modern watchmaking and the one I most enjoyed handling. But the facets that make it special also catch every doorframe and desk edge, and I spent the second month subconsciously protecting it. That is a lovely thing to feel about an object. It is a terrible thing to feel about a tool.
rotating bezel
Rolex Submariner
Let me be clear, because people get sensitive about this. The Submariner is a magnificent watch and nothing here is a criticism of how it is made. It is a criticism of what it costs to live with. I did not wear it on the underground. I did not wear it to the gym. I turned the dial inward twice in restaurants without thinking about it. Past a certain number the watch stops being yours and starts being something you are looking after.
steel bracelet
TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 200
The most sensible watch in the test and the one I would recommend without hesitation at its price. Superb bracelet, no anxiety attached, genuinely built to be knocked about. It lost on one point only, and it is the point this whole experiment turned on. At the end of sixty days I could not name a single thing it did that the eighty nine dollar watch did not also do on my wrist.
ZEPH Egeo
It is a mechanical automatic. No battery, ever. It winds itself off the motion of your wrist and the dial is cut open so you can watch it happen, which is the single most expensive looking thing a watch can do and the reason strangers ask about it.
Sapphire crystal, not mineral. 316L stainless steel case and integrated bracelet. Forty two millimetres, which sounds large on paper and does not wear large. Double butterfly clasp that disappears when it is closed.
At day sixty I went looking for the damage. There is none on the crystal. There is none on the case. My wrist has no green mark. And when I stopped the test and put the other four back in the drawer, this is the one I left on.
Sixty days later
The whole point of a wear test is what the watch looks like at the end of it, not the beginning. Here is what I found when I went over the Egeo with a loupe.
What sixty days of ordinary wear did
Keys in the same pocket, a desk, a car door, one brick wall, daily.
The clasp picked up hairlines, which every steel watch in this test did, including the Submariner.
So how is it that cheap?
This is the part everyone wants answered before they will believe the rest, so let me deal with it plainly.
A watch on a boutique shelf carries the boutique, the distributor, the regional importer, the ambassador contract and the campaign that put the ambassador on a billboard. Those are real costs and somebody pays them. It is you.
Two ways to sell a watch
Illustrative breakdown of what a retail price is carrying.
Illustrative only. Proportions are used to show the structural difference between retail and direct to consumer pricing, not audited figures for any specific brand.
ZEPH sells one way, direct, from their own site. No shelf, no importer, no face on a billboard. What you are left paying for is the case, the crystal, the movement, the bracelet and the box.
That does not make the Egeo the equal of a Submariner and I am not going to insult you by claiming it is. It makes the difference between them a lot smaller than the difference between $89 and $15,000.
The three things I actually checked
1. Is the sapphire real?
Mineral glass hazes. Sapphire does not. Sixty days of keys, desk edges, a car door and one genuinely stupid encounter with a brick wall, and the crystal is clean under a loupe. That alone puts it above most watches under three hundred dollars.
2. Does the movement hold up?
It is an automatic, so it will never match a quartz for raw accuracy and it is not supposed to. What matters is that it kept running through two months of ordinary wear without stopping, without needing to be reset from scratch, and without a single hand slipping out of alignment.
3. Can you read it at night?
This is where I expected the price to show, and it did not. The indices and hands carry a Super LumiNight coating that charges in daylight and holds for hours after dark. Not the faint smudge you get from a cheap watch. A dial you can actually read at three in the morning.
Four colourways, one watch
The test unit was the Midnight Blue. There are three others, and the two tone gold is the one that gets mistaken for something far more expensive.
Sport but not trying too hard
Been looking for something that works with jeans and a t-shirt but doesnt look like a diving toy. The Egeo hits that spot. 42mm without feeling oversized, blue dial with proper depth.
Perfect summer piece
Wore this daily through a two week Mediterranean trip. Beach, dinner, walking cities, it looked right everywhere. The sapphire crystal survived everything without a mark.
Bigger than I expected but I like it
Case is a solid 42mm which felt big on my thin wrist the first day. By day three I didnt want to take it off. Presence without being obnoxious.
Questions I got asked while testing
ZEPH Egeo Automatic
Mechanical automatic, sapphire crystal, 316L steel, four colourways. Ships free worldwide in the ZEPH presentation box.
Get the Egeo →100 day warranty · 30 day money back · Free worldwide shipping
Disclosure. This is paid advertorial content produced on behalf of ZEPH. Dial & Crown is an editorial format used by the advertiser. Product opinions in this article are presented as the writer's own account of the test described. Prices for other brands are typical retail figures at time of writing, shown for comparison only, and may vary by market and retailer.
Trademarks. Rolex, Submariner, Hublot, Classic Fusion, Bulgari, Octo Roma, TAG Heuer and Aquaracer are trademarks of their respective owners. ZEPH is not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with any of them.