The watch drawer: why most collectors wear 20% of what they own

There is a drawer somewhere in my apartment that contains several watches I have not worn in over a year. They are not bad watches. Two of them are objectively better than the watch I am wearing right now. One was an anniversary present. One has personal history attached that I would have difficulty explaining to anyone who has not lived through the same particular afternoon in Paris in 2019. I do not wear any of them, and I have spent a surprising amount of time trying to understand why.

A small confession about my own drawer

I should probably start by admitting how absurd the situation is.

I write about watches. I run a company built around watches. I have, by any reasonable measure, thought about wristwatches more than is healthy over the past few years. And the drawer is still there. I still buy occasionally. I still notice myself, on a Tuesday morning, reaching for the same three watches I have been reaching for since approximately the spring of 2024.

This is not a particularly original observation. Every serious collector I know has the same drawer. It contains different watches, but the structure is identical. A few favourites get worn. Most do not. The collector tells themselves the unworn watches are "for special occasions," or "for variety," or "I wear them in rotation," none of which quite holds up under scrutiny. The truth, when collectors are being honest, is that they wear what they wear, and most of the rest sits in the drawer waiting for a day that does not quite come.

I find this fascinating partly because it contradicts everything the industry tells us about collecting. The narrative is that collectors build a varied wardrobe of timepieces matched to occasion, mood, season, and outfit. The reality, when you look at the data rather than the marketing, is that most collectors are wearing roughly three watches and storing everything else.

The 80/20 rule, applied to your wrist

The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1896 that roughly 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. He went on to find similar distributions in other contexts. The ratio became a generalised observation, sometimes treated more seriously than it deserves, sometimes ignored when it shouldn't be. In watch collecting, it turns out to be uncomfortably accurate.

A collector who writes under the name OwnTheWatch recently published a year-long log of his 2025 rotation. He tracked every watch he wore, every day, for twelve months. Of his eight watches, three got 81 percent of his wrist time. The remaining five got 19 percent between them. He concluded, with considerable honesty, that he sold the two least-worn pieces because the data made it impossible to keep pretending he loved them.

That tracking exercise is interesting partly because the result was so close to the Pareto ratio, and partly because the conclusion was so unsettling. The other five watches were not bad watches. The data simply revealed that they were not his watches in any meaningful sense. They were watches he owned.

I have not done the equivalent tracking, partly because I am not entirely sure I want to know. The investor Charlie Munger used to say that if you do not know your incentives, you do not know your behaviour. Munger was talking about investment decisions, not watches, but the principle applies. The same applies, awkwardly, to wrist habits. The drawer probably knows more about me than I would prefer.

Why we have favorites we will not admit

The interesting question is not whether we have favorites. We obviously do. The interesting question is why we keep buying watches we will not actually wear.

I have a few theories, none of which I would defend too strongly.

One possibility is that buying a watch and wearing a watch are different psychological acts that happen to share an object. The act of buying scratches a particular itch related to choice, aesthetic appreciation, sometimes financial signaling, occasionally pure curiosity. The act of wearing scratches a different itch related to comfort, identity, ritual, and a kind of low-level relationship with a small machine that has been on your wrist all day. The first itch is much easier to scratch. The second takes time and develops in ways the buyer cannot anticipate at the point of purchase.

Another part of the answer is probably that the collector population has been quietly trained to think of watches as a catalogue rather than as wrist companions. Watch media, watch retail, watch social media all reward the act of acquiring more references. There is no equivalent reward structure for wearing the same watch for a year. The one collector I know who genuinely wears one watch (a 1970s Omega Constellation, every single day, for the past six years) is treated by other collectors with a kind of polite incomprehension. He has done what the catalogue tells you not to do.

And then there is the theory I find most plausible, partly because it is the least flattering. We acquire watches partly to become a slightly different person, and then discover that we did not actually want to become that person. The dress watch you bought to be the kind of person who wears dress watches. The dive watch you bought to be the kind of person who dives, or might dive, or watches a lot of dive watch content on YouTube. The vintage piece you bought because vintage collecting felt like a more interesting version of yourself. None of these acquisitions are dishonest. They just stop fitting once you are back in your actual life, on a Tuesday, getting ready for the same kind of day you have had for years. The hype cycle often plays a quiet role here too, but that is a different essay.

The drawer ends up holding small versions of selves the collector tried on and quietly set aside.

The collection we believe we have, and the collection our wrist actually expresses, turn out to be different objects. The gap between them is the drawer.

What an unworn watch actually costs

This is where the rational analysis gets uncomfortable.

A mechanical watch that sits in a drawer is not preserving its value. It is depreciating in slow, invisible ways. The lubricants in the movement settle and eventually congeal. The gaskets dry out. The mainspring, in some movements, takes a small set if left wound and unwound for years. Watchmakers I have asked agree on roughly the same recommendation, which is that a fine mechanical watch sitting unworn should still be serviced every five to seven years to remain in proper condition.

That maintenance cost is real. A standard service on a luxury Swiss watch ranges from a few hundred euros to several thousand, depending on the brand and the movement. The collector who owns ten watches and wears three is paying maintenance on seven watches that exist purely to be photographed occasionally and to occupy drawer space.

There is also the depreciation question, which the watch industry prefers to avoid. Most modern luxury watches do not appreciate. They depreciate, sometimes considerably, except for a small set of Rolex sports models, certain Patek references, and a handful of independent makers. The watch sitting unworn in a drawer is, in a very literal financial sense, a wasting asset. The wasting accelerates if the watch is not serviced, and the service costs accumulate whether the watch is worn or not.

I have estimated, very roughly, that my own drawer represents somewhere around fifteen percent of what those watches originally cost me, paid annually in opportunity cost, depreciation, and notional maintenance. It is not a small number. I am not going to write it down because it would ruin my afternoon.

The honest minimalists: the one-and-done collectors

The collectors who have made peace with the drawer problem have done so by refusing the drawer entirely. David Vaucher has written extensively on what he calls the "one-and-done" collection, which is exactly what it sounds like. One watch. Worn every day. Replaced only when it breaks beyond repair or stops fitting the wearer's life.

The one-and-done collector is treated as something of a curiosity in the broader watch world. He is usually a man (the demographic is, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, almost entirely male), often someone who arrived at watches later in life, often someone for whom the watch matters but the collecting does not. He wears a Speedmaster, or a Submariner, or a Tank, or in increasing numbers, a Grand Seiko. He cleans it occasionally, services it on schedule, and does not appear to feel he is missing anything.

I have spent enough time talking to one-and-done collectors to understand that they are not simply uninterested in watches. Most of them know considerably more about their single watch than most multi-watch collectors know about any of theirs. They have just made a different trade. They have traded variety for depth. The watch becomes, after enough years, less a thing they own and more a thing that has become part of how they appear to themselves and to others.

I admire this in a way that is probably visible to anyone who has read this far. I cannot, however, claim to be capable of it. The drawer remains. The acquisitions continue, more slowly than they once did, but they continue. I tell myself that this is fine. The watchmakers and dealers I know would prefer that I keep telling myself this.

What changes when something appears on the other wrist

There is one development in the last decade that has changed the drawer problem in ways the watch industry is still working out how to address.

Connected devices appeared on the opposite wrist. Apple Watches, mostly, but also Garmins, Whoops, Oura rings, the broader category of wearables that handle notifications, biometrics, sleep tracking, and the slow infrastructural creep of digital life into the body. The Jewelers Mutual 2025 watch study noted this as an emerging category, with a meaningful share of collectors now rotating between a mechanical daily wearer and an Apple Watch or Garmin on the same day, or splitting them across days, or wearing one on each wrist.

I find this shift more interesting than the industry generally seems to. The conventional story is that connected devices are a threat to mechanical watches, which is a framing that mostly serves the industry's anxiety rather than describing what owners actually do. The honest pattern is closer to coexistence. The mechanical watch carries identity. The connected device carries data. The two answer different questions, and the wrist has, somewhat reluctantly, made room for both.

What this changes for the drawer is subtle but real. When a connected device is doing the work of notifications and tracking, the mechanical watch is freed from any pretense of utility. It does not need to count steps or buzz when an email arrives. It can become, for the first time in decades, purely the thing it was for most of its history, which is to say a small mechanical instrument worn for the relationship rather than the function.

That clarification, I suspect, makes the drawer problem worse rather than better, at least in the short term. When you remove the utility justification for owning ten mechanical watches, what is left is the relationship justification, and you cannot have a meaningful relationship with ten objects simultaneously. The honest collector, looking at the data, ends up wearing three.

A useful question to ask your drawer

I have a question I sometimes ask collectors when they describe their collections in tones that I recognise as slightly anxious. It usually surfaces about ten minutes into the conversation, when they have explained why each of their twelve watches deserves a place in their rotation. The question is simple.

If a friend asked to borrow one of your watches for a month, which one would you give them?

The watch they would lend out, almost without exception, is one of the ones they would not miss. That watch tells you almost everything about which watches they actually love and which watches they own as inventory. The watches they refuse to lend are their watches. The rest are objects in their possession.

I have asked myself this question. The answer was uncomfortably clear. There are three watches I would not lend to anyone for any reason, and several others I would happily put in a box and ship across Europe with relatively little anxiety. Once you have asked yourself the question, you cannot quite un-ask it. The collection starts to reorganise around the answer.

None of this is an argument for selling everything in the drawer. There are perfectly good reasons to keep watches that you do not wear often. Sentimental attachment. Inheritance value. Aesthetic appreciation that does not require daily wear. Mechanical fascination.

What I would argue, having spent more time than is reasonable thinking about this, is that the gap between what we tell ourselves about our collections and what our wrists actually do with them is wider than most of us would prefer to admit. Closing that gap, even partially, tends to produce a collection that the wearer enjoys more, regardless of whether the total number of watches goes up or down.

The drawer, in this framing, is not a moral failure. It is a feedback signal. It says: these are watches you have, not necessarily watches you love. What you do with that signal is between you, your wrist, and the next watchmaker your service bill arrives from.

If a part of the modern collection has to make room for the connected device that increasingly handles the practical demands of the wrist, the question of which mechanical watches stay in active rotation becomes more pressing, not less. Once the connected device handles the utility, the mechanical watch has to earn its place emotionally. A wrist that carries both is a wrist that has thought clearly about which watches earned the slot. That clarity, in the end, is probably the most useful thing any drawer ever taught a collector.

FAQ

What is the 80/20 rule of watch collecting?

It is the observation, derived from Pareto's broader work on distributions, that roughly 80 percent of wrist time goes to about 20 percent of a collector's watches. A recent personal data-tracking exercise by a collector at OwnTheWatch found a ratio of 81 percent to 19 percent across eight watches and twelve months of daily logging. The pattern is consistent across most collectors who have actually measured rather than estimated.

Should I sell the watches I do not wear?

Probably some of them, but not all. Watches kept for sentimental, family, or genuine aesthetic reasons earn their place even if they are rarely worn. Watches kept out of inertia, fear of regret, or a vague sense that "I might wear it eventually" are the ones the data tends to flag. A useful filter is whether you would lend the watch to a friend for a month. The ones you would happily lend are the ones the drawer is holding for no particular reason.

Do mechanical watches need to be worn to stay in good condition?

Watchmakers recommend service intervals of roughly five to seven years for fine mechanical watches, regardless of whether they are worn. Lubricants settle and eventually degrade. Gaskets dry. Mainsprings can take a small set if left in the same position for years. Watch winders can help with running unworn automatics but do not substitute for proper service. A watch sitting unworn in a drawer is depreciating in slow, mostly invisible ways.

What is a "one-and-done" collector?

The one-and-done collector owns and wears a single watch, replaced only when it fails beyond repair or stops fitting the wearer's life. The approach trades variety for depth and is more common than the broader watch culture acknowledges, particularly among collectors who arrived at watches later in life or for whom the wearing matters more than the acquiring.

Why are connected devices changing the drawer problem?

When a connected device on the opposite wrist handles notifications, biometrics, and time-keeping utility, the mechanical watch is freed from any pretense of practical function. The honest reason to own a mechanical watch becomes the relationship the wearer has with it rather than what it does. That clarification tends to reduce the number of mechanical watches a collector can defend keeping in active rotation.

How can I tell which watches in my collection I actually love?

The most reliable test is to track wear over thirty days in a notebook, without editing afterwards. A second test is to ask yourself which watch you would lend to a friend for a month. The watches you would lend are the ones held by inertia. The ones you would not lend are the ones you actually love. The pattern, once observed, becomes difficult to ignore.