Ten years is a long time in watches, which is funny considering the industry spends so much of its time celebrating things that happened 50, 100, or 200 years ago. When Watch Gang arrived in 2016, the mechanical watch world was already very much alive, but becoming a collector looked different. You might spend a night digging through Watchuseek threads, read reviews from a handful of established publications, visit a dealer and eventually make a decision after absorbing several thousand words of debate about whether 42mm was actually too large for your wrist. Instagram was growing, YouTube was becoming useful, and online watch culture was clearly headed somewhere, but it had not yet swallowed the hobby whole.

Fast-forward to 2026 and somebody can discover a watch on TikTok over breakfast, watch three reviews before lunch, ask thousands of collectors on Reddit whether it's worth buying, compare prices around the world and order it without ever seeing a display case. The watches themselves changed over that decade, but the bigger shift was in how people discover them, judge them, buy them, talk about them and ultimately decide what deserves a place in the collection.

In 2016, the Watch World Still Had Gatekeepers

Watch collecting used to involve more friction, and that was not always a bad thing. Forums such as Watchuseek, RolexForums and TimeZone rewarded people willing to dig through old conversations, while publications including Hodinkee, aBlogtoWatch, Fratello and Monochrome had considerable influence over what enthusiasts learned about. YouTube reviews existed, Instagram wrist shots existed and online shopping certainly existed, but the ecosystem moved at a much slower pace than it does now.

That slower pace mattered because trends developed differently. A watch could build a reputation gradually through enthusiast circles instead of becoming unavoidable because an algorithm decided Tuesday morning was officially green-dial day. The industry itself was also having a complicated moment. Swiss watch exports fell roughly 10 percent in 2016 to around CHF 19.4 billion, while the Apple Watch, released the year before, was forcing the industry to confront an uncomfortable question: if your wrist could suddenly display messages, track workouts and tell you when to stand up, what exactly was the mechanical watch supposed to do?

As it turned out, mechanical watches did not need to reinvent themselves completely. People kept buying them because they offered something entirely different from a device designed to become obsolete every few years: craftsmanship, design, history, mechanics and emotional attachment. Smartwatches changed the wrist, but they never managed to make traditional watches irrelevant. If anything, the wrist became more culturally important, and mechanical watches continued to attract people who wanted something more permanent on it.

The Internet Blew the Doors Open

The biggest change of the last decade may be that watch knowledge escaped the relatively small rooms where enthusiasts once gathered. Today, information is everywhere. Reddit's r/Watches community alone has grown into the millions, while YouTube has gone from basic tabletop reviews to professionally produced documentaries, market analysis, collector interviews and hour-long discussions about movements most normal people would correctly describe as “the little thing inside the watch.” Podcasts multiplied, Instagram turned the wrist shot into its own photographic genre, and TikTok dramatically shortened the distance between “I've never heard of this watch” and “why is this suddenly sold out?”

That access has made collectors more informed, but it has also made collecting louder. Every watch now arrives with opinions attached. There are rankings, reaction videos, price trackers, wrist-roll clips, hot takes and people explaining why the perfectly good watch you bought three hours ago was obviously the wrong choice. Still, the upside is much more significant: enthusiasts can discover brands, references and entire corners of watchmaking they simply might never have encountered in 2016, and that broader exposure helped change what a respectable collection could look like.

The Brand Name Stopped Being the Whole Conversation

A decade ago, newer collectors could easily come away with the impression that the hobby had a fairly rigid ladder. You started somewhere affordable, climbed through increasingly established Swiss brands and eventually arrived at one of a handful of names everyone agreed you were supposed to want. That hierarchy still exists, and Rolex certainly did not become obscure, but collectors became much more comfortable wandering off the established path.

Microbrands are perhaps the clearest example. Crowdfunding, direct-to-consumer sales, access to reliable movements from companies such as Miyota, Seiko and Sellita, and direct communication through social media gave small companies tools that would have been much harder to access in previous decades. By the 2020s, brands such as Baltic had demonstrated that a young company with a strong design identity could develop a serious international following. At the same time, Japanese watchmaking gained even greater enthusiast visibility, while brands including Seiko, Grand Seiko, Citizen and Casio increasingly occupied very different, yet equally legitimate, places inside serious collections.

That has produced one of the healthiest changes in modern collecting: eclecticism. A watch box containing a luxury Swiss sports watch, a Japanese diver, a microbrand, a quartz piece and a $50 digital Casio no longer needs explaining. The collection can be coherent because the owner likes the watches, not because every reference follows an accepted prestige ladder.

Affordable Watches Got Much More Interesting

This widening of taste happened partly because the lower and middle sections of the market became genuinely exciting. Sapphire crystals, dependable automatic movements, stronger bracelets, improved finishing and enthusiast-friendly specifications became increasingly common at attainable prices. A buyer searching below $1,000 in 2026 is confronted with a slightly absurd number of credible choices, which is a very different problem from having too few.

The Tissot PRX is a good example of how quickly this can happen. Introduced in 2021, it brought the integrated-bracelet aesthetic into a price category accessible to a far broader audience and became one of the defining mainstream watch successes of the decade. Microbrands pushed in the same direction, often competing aggressively on specifications and design because they could not rely on 150 years of history printed on the dial.

Importantly, watches did not simply become cheaper. Plenty became more expensive. What improved was the amount of choice, quality and personality available to someone who was not shopping with a five-figure budget. For newer collectors, that meant the first serious watch no longer had to feel like a compromise before graduating to something “better.” In many cases, the affordable watch was simply a very good watch.

Then the Market Got a Little Crazy

No history of collecting from 2016 to 2026 works without discussing the great watch-market fever dream of the early 2020s. During the pandemic, enthusiasm, restricted supply, extra disposable income for some buyers and a flood of speculative money collided. Watches that were already difficult to buy at retail became financial assets in the eyes of people who occasionally seemed only vaguely interested in watches.

By early 2022, the secondary market had reached extraordinary levels. Some Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet models were trading at multiples of retail, while average Rolex secondary-market transaction prices reportedly reached more than $17,000 in March 2022, nearly twice their level 18 months earlier. For a while, waiting lists, resale premiums and the possibility of flipping a watch became nearly as much a part of the conversation as movements, finishing and design.

The correction that followed through 2023 and 2024 was a useful reminder that watches do, in fact, obey gravity. Prices dropped sharply across many of the hottest references, and while the secondary market remained important, the idea that every desirable sports watch was destined to become an appreciating asset became much harder to defend. That episode changed collectors permanently. Resale value is now part of the conversation in a way it was not for most enthusiasts in 2016, price tracking is easier, and secondary-market platforms are far more sophisticated. Perhaps the most useful lesson was also the simplest: a watch you actually enjoy wearing performs considerably better as a watch than one you bought because somebody on the internet promised it was an investment.

Our Taste Changed With the Market

Look at the watches themselves and the decade becomes visible. Large cases remained common in 2016, while by 2026 smaller and more historically influenced proportions had returned with force. At Watches and Wonders 2026, the average case size across one analysis of 123 releases landed at exactly 40mm, with most watches sitting between 37 and 42mm. The shift does not mean large watches disappeared, but collectors became much more sensitive to proportion, lug-to-lug measurements, case thickness and the way a watch actually wears rather than treating diameter as the only number that matters.

Color changed too. Rolex's bright Oyster Perpetual dials in 2020 helped accelerate an industry-wide appetite for color, followed by green, turquoise, salmon, pink, burgundy, brown, pastel tones and pretty much everything that could rescue another display case from being entirely black, white and blue. Integrated bracelets went from trend to near-obligation, GMTs multiplied and vintage-inspired releases became a permanent category rather than an occasional anniversary exercise. None of these shifts erased what came before; they simply gave collectors a much bigger vocabulary.

Watch Gang Grew Up During the Same Decade

That's what makes Watch Gang turning 10 interesting beyond the anniversary itself. The company began in 2016 with a model built around discovery: members receiving watches they might not otherwise have encountered and becoming part of a community where watches could be discussed, traded and collected. Rolex giveaways followed shortly after launch in December 2016 and eventually became a weekly tradition, while The Wheel later added another version of the same core idea by bringing chance and discovery into the process of choosing what lands in the watch box.

The surrounding industry has changed dramatically since then, and Watch Gang has changed with it. In 2026, the company entered a new chapter under CEO Chad Tsagris, with a broader emphasis on community, transparency, discovery and experiences beyond the original subscription model. That evolution makes sense because the collector on the other side of the screen has evolved too.

In some ways, the collecting world has moved closer to the idea Watch Gang started with. People are more willing to experiment, mix price points, discover unfamiliar brands online and build collections around personality instead of completing somebody else's checklist. There are simply more watches to discover now, which makes having a reason to look beyond the obvious choices more valuable than it was ten years ago.

Ten Years Later, the Best Part Hasn't Changed

A collector in 2026 has better tools than a collector in 2016: more information, more brands, better price transparency, easier access to pre-owned watches, more direct contact with makers and more reviews than any reasonable person could watch in one lifetime. The trade-off is having considerably more noise to filter through, because every purchase can now feel like it needs to survive an internet referendum before it reaches the wrist.

Beneath all of that, the reason people become attached to watches has remained remarkably stubborn. A watch can mark a promotion, a wedding, a trip, a birthday or an ordinary Saturday when you found something you couldn't stop thinking about. It can remind you of someone, introduce you to a corner of watchmaking you didn't know existed, or become the cheap watch you somehow wear more than the expensive one.

Ten years ago, collectors were chasing that feeling through forums, dealers, watch magazines and early online communities. Today, they're chasing it through Reddit threads, YouTube videos, group chats, microbrands, secondary marketplaces, subscriptions and an endless scroll of wrist shots. The routes multiplied considerably, but the fun part stayed the same.

What changed most about the way you collect watches over the last ten years and what do you think the hobby will look like by 2036?