Alright, let me walk you through how I ended up trying to rank watch brands. It wasn’t some grand plan, honestly. It started pretty simply because friends, and even folks online sometimes, kept asking me stuff like, “Which watch brand is good?” or “Is Brand X better than Brand Y?”. After a while, I figured, okay, maybe I should actually sit down and try to sort this out for myself, put my own thoughts in order.
So, the first thing I did was just grab a piece of paper, well, actually opened a note app on my computer, and started jotting down all the watch brands I could think of off the top of my head. You know, the famous ones, the ones I owned, the ones I’d seen around. That list got pretty long, pretty quick.
Then came the tricky part: how to rank them? What makes one “better”? This took some real head-scratching. I thought about a few things:
- History and Reputation: How long has the brand been around? What are they known for? Do people generally respect them?
- Craftsmanship/Quality: How well are the watches actually made? What kind of materials do they use? What about the movements inside?
- Price Range: You can’t ignore cost. Are they super expensive luxury, affordable everyday, or somewhere in between? Value for money matters.
- Design/Style: Do they have a unique look? Are they innovative or just copying others? This one’s subjective, I know.
- Personal Feeling: Yeah, I added this one. Sometimes a brand just clicks, or doesn’t, for reasons hard to explain.
Digging In
Okay, with those ideas in mind, I started digging deeper into the brands on my list. This meant spending a lot of time just reading stuff. I browsed forums (carefully, lots of strong opinions there!), looked through brand histories on their official sites (trying to read between the marketing fluff), and checked out reviews from different places. I didn’t really go to stores for this, it was mostly online research during evenings and weekends.
It got messy. Some brands have a huge range, from cheap quartz to super complex mechanical pieces. How do you rank that? And some old brands aren’t what they used to be, while some newer ones are doing really interesting things. It wasn’t as simple as just assigning points.
Trying to Make Sense of It
I realized a strict number 1, 2, 3 ranking was almost impossible and maybe kind of pointless. It felt more natural to group brands into tiers. Like, you have the absolute top-tier luxury guys, the solid high-end brands, the great value mid-tier ones, reliable affordable options, and maybe some niche or specialist brands.
So I started shuffling my list around, putting brands into these buckets. It was a lot of dragging and dropping, making notes, changing my mind. Seriously, I changed my mind a lot. You read one thing, it makes sense, then you read something else that contradicts it. Or you realize you were biased towards a brand you personally like.
It took quite a bit of time to get something that felt somewhat stable, something I could stand behind, at least for myself. It’s definitely not perfect, and someone else doing the same thing would probably come up with a different list. There’s no single “right” answer here, which was a big takeaway for me.
So, that was basically my process. Started with a simple question, did a bunch of research, wrestled with how to compare things fairly, and ended up grouping brands rather than making a strict numbered list. It was an interesting exercise, definitely made me think more critically about what makes a watch brand tick, pun intended.
