You don’t have to spend tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands to build a solid watch collection. Today I’m showing you my top AFFORDABLE watches that watch collectors love and respect and that celebrities wear, all under $10,000!
As you guys know, at Luxury Bazaar, we like to showcase big, expensive, rare pieces. Today I decided to show you some watches that are below that $10,000, or $5,000 mark, but also to show you that even celebrities wear watches in that price range. It’s not always about the price, it’s about buying what you like first and foremost, within the price range you can afford.Â
This is something I’ve been preaching about since the beginning. Now, there are a lot of factors to consider starting with things like brands, complications, what metal the watch is, how prestigious the watch is, how rare the watch is, or how old the watch is. Â
Casio G-SHOCK
The first watch I’m talking about today is the least expensive of them all, the Casio G-SHOCK. It’s extremely affordable. Every G-SHOCK out there is around a hundred bucks, give or take. Let’s go back to 1983, Super Mario Bros is introduced as a video game in Japan, as well as Motorola company introduces the first mobile phone.
I believe a guy at the Casio factory happened to have dropped his father’s pocket watch, which broke. This right away got him thinking, “wouldn’t it be great if I can create a watch that would be shockproof, and not break when it drops? And that’s when the G-SHOCK was born, which stands for gravitational shock. This is a watch that you get down and dirty in and rightfully so because it has 10 elements protecting the quartz movement. The watch is shock-resistant, water-resistant, rust-resistant, mud and dust resistant, can withstand extreme temperature, anti-magnetic structures, and it uses a rubber bumper around the movement. The watch also utilizes a super-secret, alpha gel as they call it, which is a silicone material that protects against chemicals, UV rays, and helps absorb some vibrations. That’s a lot for a hundred dollars watch. Now, this thing is marketed to be the most indestructible watch on the planet.
And even though this is just a relatively cheap hundred-dollar watch, its popularity is insane. You got guys like Kanye West wearing this thing, you got Eminem wearing this thing, you got Lil Wayne wearing this thing, you got Roman Sharf wearing this thing. That’s right, I have a G-SHOCK on my wrist, AKA the CasiOak. And when I go skydiving and mountain climbing and rock climbing, this is the watch that I wear. I don’t really do any of those things, but this is the watch I would wear if I were to do all those things.
But in all seriousness, this thing comes in so many different colors and variations and functionalities, et cetera. It’s a quartz watch, it’s super accurate, obviously, and it doesn’t require a whole lot of maintenance except for changing a battery occasionally. It’s so versatile, and that’s what I think makes Casio a super popular choice, I would say, in that $500 and under category.Â
Omega Speedmaster
Next up, Omega Speedmaster. Omega is a super popular choice among collectors looking for something under $10,000, sometimes under $5,000. You can also find a cool pre-owned Omega between $3,000 and $4,000. Why is it so popular? Its history, it has the chronograph, which is one of the best and the most popular complications in the watch, and again, price. You can pick this watch up relatively inexpensively. As I said, it’s a watch that gets a ton of respect from the collective community, as well as Hollywood.
Tom Hanks. I mean the guy made a movie with a volleyball by himself. If he was to ever make a sequel where he’s stuck on the moon, it’d be the perfect watch. Of course, you also have the past most eligible bachelor in Hollywood, George Clooney, wearing a Speedmaster.
Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso
Next up. Let’s talk about the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso. Jaeger doesn’t get a lot of love from collectors, and it absolutely should because Jaeger is extremely important in the watch world. They have created over 1200 movements for pretty much every major watch brand out there. The reason their watches are priced reasonably is that they’re able to make their own movements, they don’t have to go out to other guys and buy them. If it wasn’t for Jaeger our watch world landscape would not look the way it does now. Â
Let’s go back to 1833 when a self-taught watchmaker by the name of Antoine LeCoultre started his own company. In 1930, a year after the market crash and the great depression here in the United States, he came out with what’s called the Reverso. The way this whole thing came about is a friend of Jacques-David LeCoultre, challenged him to make a watch that could protect the glass of the watch during a polo match. So what did you do? He said I’m going to flip the whole thing upside down, protected.
Over the years, the popularity has gone down maybe because of the Art Deco design. Fashion tastes were changing, watches were mostly round and they kind of stopped making them, I believe in the seventies or in the very least they limited production. They made very, very few of them because again, nobody really wanted them.
In 1994 one of my idols in the watch world came to save the day. Max Büsser, who came to work for Jaeger LeCoultre and said immediately, we’re going to revamp this entire Reverso thing. He introduced a concept called a duo face, which means that now your watch was not just made for protection. Now you had one watch face on one side, another watch face on the other, so if a polo ball hit it, crack, but nobody cared.
In 2006, I believe, Jaeger shocked the world with yet another innovation, a three-face watch. They released the Triptyque, where you had functionalities on one side, functionalities on the other side and functionalities on the inside of the case. In 2021, the 90th anniversary of the Reverso, they made a Quadriptyque. This is a watch that now had four faces. It was their current complication and mind you all that is driven by a single movement. It’s not very affordable, but it’s certainly one to read up about because it’s extremely, extremely important.
An average plain Reverso will probably set you back anywhere from $5,000 to $6,000, which is actually pretty insane for one, a model that’s super iconic from a brand that’s extremely important in the world of Horology.
Let’s talk about celebrities, Jay-Z wore to the 2021 Grammys. Matt Damon wore it out once on the cover of GQ. How about Christian Bale as Batman? He wore that watch in the movie, the entire movie. And it kind of fits that dark, Gothic, Art Deco-ish feel to the watch, a fit for Batman as far as I’m concerned.
Tudor
Last on this list, I’m going to go with the other Rolex… a Tudor. Founded by Hans, the founder of Rolex, but it was produced to basically make more affordable tool watches. This was a real tool watch. The Rolex team got together and said, okay, wait a minute the tool watches we created with Rolex kind of got expensive. We can still keep the same appeal of Rolex, the same quality of Rolex, and give people the confidence of the quality of a Rolex, but scale down the price a little bit and pick up that market that could not afford Rolexes at the time.Â
Starting in 1926, Tudor originally produced a lot of dive watches, which were used by professional divers, as well as the military. It was in the 50s that Tudor adopted the Rolex self-winding movement for its Oyster case. The brand had its ups, it had its downs, and in 2011, it stopped selling in the United States, as well as the UK due to unpopularity.
Rolex was still available for purchase at most authorized dealers, not like today. So in 2011, they hired David Cerrato, as Tudor’s new designer. He completely revamped the brand and its popularity skyrocketed once again. Why? The guy said, “So I’m just going to take the new Tudors and design them based on old Rolex models.” Rolex is the most popular brand in the world, why not? Because Tudors are still associated with Rolex, it’s not like they just went and copied Rolex, they are Rolex so that worked out. In 2012, the now iconic Black Bay came out and solidified the popularity of Tudor in the market.
David Beckham is a guy that wears Tudor, as well as Lady Gaga, who was the first lady ambassador for the brand. Beckham being an ambassador and all, you can still spot him wearing these things everywhere, casually. I mean, I know that some of these ambassadors have so much wear time with a Tudor, but he’s always spotted everywhere wearing Tudor, so obviously, this is something he likes.
Will Smith has been spotted wearing Tudors. Even the very famous watch collector John Mayer, has been spotted wearing Tudors. He could probably buy the entire lineup of Tudors with just the one of the Patek’s he has, but it just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you buy what you like. Obviously, John Mayer loves Tudor just the same.
So, there you have it guys. There are plenty of pieces out there that are affordable. The reason I decided to associate them with celebrities is just to show you that it’s not about how much money you have. It’s about how much you like something, buying what you like first and foremost because a lot of these cheaper watches that I showed you today are worn by celebrities. And we live in that culture where we tend to read the tabloids and see what these people are wearing.