Heads: Every Watch I Was Never Supposed to Own

A collector’s confession, told in full.

Yesterday I bought a Movado Bold Verso at TJ Maxx.

Not online. Not at a boutique. Not from an authorized dealer where someone in a pressed shirt walks you through the provenance and hands you a velvet-lined box. At TJ Maxx. Between the discounted luggage and a rack of irregular khakis. I picked it up off the shelf, turned it over in my hand, felt the weight of the gold-on-gold case, and thought — yes. That’s mine.

I also have a 40-year plan to buy a Patek Philippe.

Both things are true at the same time, and I’ve stopped pretending one cancels out the other.

—

The honest story of this collection doesn’t start at a white-glove AD or with a lifelong obsession carefully tended from childhood. It starts the way most real things start — sideways, without warning, and at slightly the wrong moment.

I was 27, newly married, and I bought a Bulova chronograph because I wanted to look like someone who had his life together. That’s the whole story. There was no deeper rationale. I wanted a watch that said something about me before I had fully figured out what that was. Twenty years later, it’s heading in for its first service — new seals, a polish, the kind of attention a watch earns after two decades of keeping quiet and keeping time. It still runs perfectly. That feels important somehow.

The Seiko came next, on my honeymoon. A cruise ship somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas, the kind of gift shop that exists in the space between one world and another. I bought it because I was happy and it was there and it caught the light in a way that felt like the right moment to own something. I have never once regretted that purchase. Some watches are complications and movements and case diameters. That Seiko is a Tuesday in the Bahamas when everything was exactly right.

Then came a Kenneth Cole Reaction digital — and I want to be honest about why. I was deep into everything Kenneth Cole at the time. The brand, the aesthetic, the particular shade of early-2000s cool it represented. The watch wasn’t a watch decision as much as it was a style decision, which is its own kind of collecting logic even if I didn’t know that yet.

The one that surprised me most, looking back, was a skeleton automatic I found on eBay in 2008. A Markus Ruby Calendarium. Sixty-one dollars. The first automatic I’d ever owned, and the first skeleton I’d ever seen. I remember looking at it and thinking — you can see the whole thing working. Every gear, every wheel, every beat of the movement visible through the dial. I had no idea a watch could do that. That $61 eBay watch opened a door I’ve never closed.

Then life moved the way life does. A decade passed. A Fossil Relic for $45. A Casio world timer. And then a vintage Casio for $13 that I feel compelled to tell you about specifically.

It is, without question, the most uncomfortable watch I own. The case sits wrong on the wrist. The bracelet is unforgiving in a way that suggests Casio was not especially concerned with comfort in that era. It is also, honestly, pretty ugly. I read somewhere years ago that the battery lasts fifteen years. That has turned out to be true. I have never replaced it. I have never adjusted it. I rarely let it out of the watch box.

It is the most accurate timepiece in my entire collection. Still. To this day. Unchanged.

I have a 40-year plan to buy a Patek Philippe. I own a $13 Casio that has been right about the time every single day for nearly a decade without anyone asking it to try. I think about that more than is probably warranted.

I don’t regret a single one.

—

Something shifted in 2025. I’m not sure I can point to a single moment — it was more like a pressure that had been building quietly for years finally finding a direction. I started paying attention differently. Not just to watches I was buying, but to the watches I wanted. The ones I kept coming back to. The ones that made me stop scrolling.

I bought a couple of Timex Expeditions from Amazon. Then two Casios in the same week. None of it was premeditated. I was just a man in his late forties who had finally admitted to himself that he loved watches and had given himself permission to act on it.

The Timex Tide came next. A tide-temp-compass watch — practical, a little technical, interesting in a way I found quietly satisfying. I ordered it from Timex.com. It’s still on pre-order. Still making its way to me. It hasn’t arrived yet.

The irony of that is not lost on me. The watch that quietly started everything is the last one to the party.

—

In the space of about four weeks, I bought sixteen watches.

A Longines Master Collection — Year of the Horse, limited edition, the year of my birth pressed into the dial — from Tourneau. An Oceaneva 6000m deep diver in Grade 5 titanium that descends to depths no sensible living thing should visit. A Citizen TSUYOSA limited edition. A numbered NSB Apollo NFT piece. A Stewart Dawson military green that arrived through Watch Gang like a pleasant ambush. A Swatch Mission to Earthphase in Moonshine Gold that I will wear with a suit and precisely zero apologies. Two more Timex Expeditions from Walmart on a Saturday afternoon, because four is better than two and two had clearly not been enough. And yesterday — the Movado.

—

Then there were the two watches from Timex ReWound.

Timex ReWound is a take-back program. Customers send their used watches back to Timex at no cost — free shipping label, drop it in the mail, done. Timex receives them, cleans and restores the ones that still have life in them, and puts them back up for sale. The ones that don’t qualify get ground down and recycled into materials for new products. Nothing wasted. Everything given another chance, or allowed to become part of something else entirely.

I bought two automatics that looked interesting — possibly vintage, definitely worth having. What I didn’t fully reckon with until after I’d ordered them is that these watches belonged to someone else first. Someone wore them, lived in them, and then sent them back. I don’t know whose wrists they came from. I don’t know what they saw or why they were returned. They’re still in transit. I won’t know exactly what I’ve got until I open the box.

I find I don’t mind that at all. A watch with a previous life is a watch with a story I’m only getting the second chapter of.

The price range across those four weeks runs from $48 to $3,638. The locations run from Walmart to an authorized Longines dealer to a discount retailer to Timex’s own website. Every single one of them was purchased because something in me said — yes. That one. Now.

—

I have twin sons — Jansen and Vaughan, both 18, about to graduate high school and start their own journey. I’m building something for them that was never built for me. I don’t know if they appreciate watches right now — probably not the way I do. But I’d imagine one day they will. At some point in life, everyone needs a good watch. And when that moment comes for them, I want them to already have an overflowing collection to choose from. They don’t know it yet. That’s fine. I’m building it anyway.

—

There is a roadmap. There is a strategy. There is a plan that runs longer than I’m going to tell you about here, because that’s a different article — the other side of this coin.

But the roadmap didn’t come first. The joy came first. The Bulova at 27 and the Seiko on a cruise ship and the $13 Casio and the four Timex Expeditions and the Movado Bold Verso on a Saturday afternoon between the luggage and the khakis — all of that came first, and all of it is real, and none of it is something I have any interest in apologizing for.

The collection I’m building isn’t the collection I was supposed to build. It’s messier than that, and more human, and considerably more fun.

The Timex Tide is still in transit. Everything else got here first.

-Jaime