Women Are Quietly Taking Over Watch Collecting

When I first got into watches, the picture I had of a “collector” formed itself without much thought. A middle aged guy in a steel Daytona or a Submariner. Polo shirt, quiet confidence, and probably a spec sheet memorised for every reference ever made.

Early forums were full of men debating lug width, clasp revisions, waitlists, the correct era of a particular calibre. It felt like a club built on reference numbers, accuracy tests, and the same five watches appearing in every single thread.

That old picture still sits somewhere in my mind, but it no longer matches the world I see. When I open Instagram today, the most interesting wrist shots are almost never from the classic watch guy archetype.

They come from women. Women styling a Cartier Tank with jewellery. Women pairing a vintage Rolex with streetwear. Women telling you why they bought a watch rather than listing everything inside it. The whole atmosphere feels new. It feels personal, expressive, and refreshingly modern.

Then I came across recent report that confirmed what my feed had been hinting at. It notes the rise in female bidders at major auction houses and the increasing number of significant purchases made by younger female collectors. My timeline and the data were pointing to the same conclusion.

Women are not a side note in watch culture anymore. They are not a marketing segment or an afterthought. They are becoming the central story, and the industry has been slower to recognise it than the community itself.

The Data That Finally Killed the “Watch Guy” Myth

The turning point for me was not Instagram. It was the numbers. Deloitte’s latest Swiss Watch Industry Study lays it out in a way that is hard to ignore.

The willingness to buy a luxury watch is now almost identical between men and women. The report goes even further by highlighting women and Gen Z as the groups expected to drive the next phase of growth.

In other words, the future customer base is not the stereotype the industry still imagines. It is younger, more diverse, and far more balanced in gender than the old watch guy narrative ever allowed.

Deloitte’s own spotlight on the female market makes the point even clearer. It does not talk about women as a niche to gently court or an emerging curiosity. It frames them as one of the most important growth engines in the entire category. Not a side market. Not an optional segment. A core group.

The shift becomes even more visible when you look at auction behaviour. Reporting in the Financial Times shows a sharp rise in female bidders at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and similar houses. Younger women are placing higher bids on vintage pieces, jewellery watches, and design focused models.

They are not observing the hobby from a distance. They are taking part in some of the most valuable sales and shaping what becomes desirable.

Once you combine the Deloitte data with what is happening in auction rooms, the old stereotype collapses instantly. You cannot argue that men are the only “serious collectors” when women are matching willingness to buy, driving demand, and spending real money at the top of the market.

The myth did not disappear because social media made the hobby more visible. It disappeared in the numbers long before the marketing caught up.

Instagram Told Me the Truth Before the Industry Did

If I am honest, the biggest shift in my understanding of watch culture did not come from a report or a statistic. It came from scrolling. On Instagram, the most interesting watch content in my feed is created by women. Not ten percent of it. Not a small corner. A noticeable share that grows every month. And the tone is completely different from the watch content I grew up with.

Back then, almost everything in my feed felt identical. Same pose, same cuff, same steel sports watch, same captions about calibres and reference numbers. You could scroll past ten posts and barely notice you had left one account and entered another. It felt like a uniform. Clean, technical, predictable.

Now the mood is completely different. Women post watches as part of their lives rather than as isolated objects. The caption is not “reference X with calibre Y”. It is “I wore this on the day I left my old job” or “this is my favourite piece to take on holiday.” The watch becomes part of a story, not a chapter heading in a spec sheet.

The clearest example is Dimepiece, founded by Brynn Wallner. It started as an Instagram account celebrating women who wear watches and turned into a full media brand and community. Every post is fun, stylish, relatable and personal. There is a reason it resonates. It feels human.

Even Marie Claire’s feature on the Timex Intrepid collaboration with Brynn shows how far the industry has moved. Instead of a pink dial or a shrunken version of a men’s model, the watch is nostalgic, sporty and gender neutral.

My feed today is full of colour, style, personality and real life moments. Women did not just join the conversation. They changed the tone of it. And honestly, the hobby is much better for it.

Women Made Watch Collecting More Honest

One thing that stayed with me while reading the different reports on female collectors was how familiar the stories felt. The women interviewed did not talk about their watches as trophies or status signals. They described them as chapters.

A watch tied to a career shift. A watch bought after getting through a difficult year. A watch that reminds them of home, or travel, or a version of themselves they were trying to grow into. The language felt emotional and lived in, completely different from the classic collector tone that dominated forums for years.

If you want to go deeper into “Story Watches”, I covered it fully here: Why Everyone Suddenly Wants a Story Watch And Not a Spec Monster

And this matches what I see in the community every single day. When women talk about a watch, the first instinct is to explain why it matters, not what powers it. The meaning comes first. The spec sheet, if it shows up at all, comes much later.

Not because the technical side is irrelevant, but because it is not the centre of the story. There is far less of the old “can I out-flex everyone here” mindset and far more of “does this feel like me, and does it suit my life”.

It is not that women ignore movements or heritage. Many know brand history better than the average watch guy. It is simply that they prioritise the human part of collecting. They choose watches that reflect their style, their mood, their memories, and their sense of identity.

They wear a watch the way someone might wear perfume or jewellery or any personal marker. It is a part of the self, not a badge of conquest.

This approach quietly reshaped the hobby. Without forcing anything or trying to rewrite culture, women normalised story driven collecting. They made it acceptable to value feeling over flex and to choose watches that speak to you, not to strangers.

In a way, they legitimised the idea of the “story watch” long before most of us even had the language for it. The hobby is warmer, more expressive, and far more interesting because of that shift.

Why Some Brands Still Don’t Understand Female Collectors

There is a certain kind of watch marketing that still feels stuck in another decade. You see it every time a brand takes an existing men’s model, shrinks the case, thins the profile, adds a ring of diamonds, tosses in a flower pattern, paints the dial pink and proudly calls it the “ladies version”.

It is the same formula from the early 2000s, built on the idea that women are accessories to male buyers rather than collectors in their own right. Some brands even default to quartz for the women’s line, as if the quiet message is that women are not serious enough to care about movements.

The language can feel just as dated. “Entry level”, “Delicate wrists”, “For the elegant woman”, and the list goes on! The tone treats women like spectators who occasionally peek into the hobby, not participants shaping it.

The FT has already pointed out how far this is from reality. Women now collect across the entire spectrum. Small watches, large watches, vintage pieces, independents, sporty watches, elegant watches, quirky designs, complications. Taste in watch collecting is no longer following gender lines. The patterns are fluid, and the collectors themselves are confident.

Thankfully, not every brand is stuck in the past. Cartier is the clearest example of a house that avoids gender boxes entirely. The Tank, Santos and Panthère are treated as true unisex icons. Cartier allows women to lead trends around slimmer, refined cases without ever calling those choices “feminine”.

Hermès goes even further by treating watches as design objects first. No gender rules, no lazy assumptions. Just good design.

The Timex x Dimepiece Intrepid collaboration drives the point home. It brought back a 90s sailing watch in a 36 mm case with a nostalgic, preppy feel. No pink, no shrink and sparkle formula. Just a watch that anyone can wear. And people loved it because it felt honest and modern.

Deloitte’s recent commentary on women in leadership at houses like Audemars Piguet and Jaeger LeCoultre makes the picture even clearer. The women running these maisons talk openly about treating female clients as serious collectors with serious taste. That is the tone the whole industry needs to adopt.

What I want from brands is simple. Not more women’s collections. Not more pastel dials. I want watches built with the assumption that women are collectors with their own style, their own budgets and their own point of view. Not accessories to someone else’s purchase.

The Auction Rooms Tell the Real Story

If you want to see how the market is really shifting, you need to look beyond Instagram and into the auction rooms. The Financial Times has already reported a clear rise in younger buyers at major houses, and a significant part of that growth is coming from women.

These are not casual bidders who show up once in a while. These are women placing serious bids on vintage Cartier, Tanks, jewellery pieces, smaller Royal Oaks and design forward models. The old idea that women buy handbags while men buy the watches has no connection to what is happening at the top of the market.

You see the same pattern in the wider jewellery auction boom. The surge of women entering not just as buyers, but as confident collectors who know exactly what they want. They understand value, they study rarity, and they are willing to pursue the pieces that speak to them.

Vintage Cartier has exploded largely because women pushed it into the spotlight. The same thing happened with midsize pieces that a decade ago sat in an awkward middle ground. Too small for men, too simple for women. Now they are some of the strongest performers because women turned them into genuine style staples.

There is another layer here that deserves attention. Women now hold major leadership positions in the auction world at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. When women shape how lots are curated, photographed and presented, the tone of the entire category changes.

Watches and jewellery stop being split into “serious” and “decorative” and instead get treated as cultural objects with meaning. That shift alone breaks the old hierarchy that placed men at the top of the collecting pyramid.

Once you look at the numbers and the behaviour inside these auction houses, it becomes impossible to say that watch collecting is still a mostly male arena. Money follows taste, and a lot of the taste driving these bidding wars is coming from women. The market is not just reacting to that. It is being rebuilt around it.

How Women Changed Watch Culture

The ripple effect of all this shows up most clearly in the places where watch culture actually lives. At meetups, in WhatsApp groups, in Discord servers and even in small local gatherings, the mood has shifted in a very real way.

Ten years ago these spaces felt like closed circles. Mostly men, mostly guarded, mostly technical. Conversations often sounded like quiet competitions. Who knew more. Who could spot the fake first. Who had memorised reference history. It was a culture built on proving yourself before being allowed to belong.

Now the atmosphere feels completely different. You see more mixed groups, more women, and a much more relaxed energy. The conversations have changed too. People talk about outfits, travel, lifestyle, and the moment they bought the watch, not only lug width or price curves.

A Royal Oak might still spark a discussion about proportions, but it might also lead someone to share the story of wearing it to a first job interview or during a major life shift. The emotional side of collecting is not something people feel the need to hide anymore.

This shift lines up with what the Financial Times has highlighted about women working inside the industry. From event organisers to brand leads to community builders, women have played a major role in breaking the old “prove yourself first” mindset.

The spaces they shape feel more welcoming, more curious and less confrontational. When the environment changes, the behaviour naturally changes with it.

What I find most interesting is how younger male collectors have adapted. Many now talk about watches in more stylistic and personal ways, rather than sticking to the old spec driven language. When the room opens up, everyone relaxes.

Women did not just enter watch guy culture. They softened it, widened it and made it more expressive. The culture grew stronger because the people inside it became more diverse.

What the Industry Must Fix Next

If the industry is serious about keeping up with the reality of who buys watches today, it needs to stop designing for a fictional man who barely exists anymore. Too many brands still behave as if the default customer is a 55 year old banker with a steel sports watch, a bonus cheque and a predictable taste profile. That persona might have worked years ago. It feels painfully outdated now.

Brands need to involve women directly in product and marketing decisions. Not as token voices at the end of the process, but as actual architects of the strategy. Female collectors should be in the room when models are shaped, colours are chosen and stories are written. They should not be treated as a niche or a secondary audience.

On top of that, sizing needs to be treated as a matter of personal style, not gender. The idea that 36 mm is for women and anything above 40 mm is automatically masculine belongs in a museum. People wear what suits them, not what a brochure tells them.

Brands also have to stop assuming that women are only interested in jewellery pieces, pastel colours or simplified complications. Plenty of women care deeply about chronographs, travel watches, independents and high horology. They do not need a side entrance. They deserve to be part of the main conversation.

Watch media has just as much work to do. Women should appear on covers, on camera and in roundtables as experts, not as guests added for the sake of balance. Publications need to commission more women to write features, review watches and host video formats.

And the habit of treating women in watches as a novelty segment needs to fade out. Women should be part of everyday coverage because they are part of the everyday collector base. The industry is improving, but gaps in representation and decision making are still easy to see. If brands want to stay relevant, they need to build a world where women are not an afterthought. They are central to the future of watch culture.

The Future of Watch Collecting Looks Very Different Now

The data shows it clearly. Men and women show almost equal interest in buying luxury watches. Social media makes the shift even more obvious. Women lead many of the creative conversations, the styling choices and the story driven posts that give modern watch culture its personality.

And the auction rooms confirm it in the most concrete way possible. Women are bidding, winning and spending on serious pieces, not just decorative ones. Money tells the truth more honestly than marketing ever does.

If you still think of watches as a guys only category, you are not describing the present. You are describing nostalgia. The future of this hobby looks far more like a Dimepiece feed than a forum archive. Women at the centre. Women in the frame. Women wearing what they like and setting the tone for everyone else.

Women are not the new watch guys because they copied the old rules. They are the new watch guys because they quietly wrote something better.