I started this website by writing a series of articles about watches. Why? Well, I’ve been a minor watch collector for many years and have always had a fascination with well-made and minimalist timepieces. And while I normally wear my Apple watch daily, I’ll often dig into my collection of more traditional wristwatches when going out on a fancy date with my wife or attending some other more formal occasion.
So I was deeply fascinated when the folks at Watch Gang offered to send me a sampling of their service for me to review. My colleague Jacob Thompson recently wrote about this service profiling some of the best subscription boxes for men. Still, I wanted to take a deeper dive into this service dedicated to horology fans like myself and discover the real or perceived value of subscribing to Watch Gang.
ABOUT WATCH GANG
Watch Gang was founded in 2016 by Matthew Galagher with a mission to allow fans of wristwatches to grow their collections affordably. The Los Angeles-based company’s other stated goals can be summed up as wanting to provide a service that preserves the wonder, surprise and magic in getting a beautiful timepiece delivered to your home that you may have otherwise never discovered.
Now that’s all well and good in principle, but is subscribing to the Watch Gang service worthy of your hard-earned money? Should serious watch collectors consider buying into it? Who exactly is Watch Gang for? Having now experienced the Watch Gang service and after copious research dedicated to talking to other Watch Gang customers and reading through as many reviews as I could get my hands on, I think I’m qualified to answer all those questions. But first, let’s talk about how the service works.
HOW DOES WATCH GANG WORK?
Because Watch Gang is a monthly mystery watch club, the idea is that you can subscribe to the service at one of three tiers. Each corresponding level is more expensive than the last and will dictate the types of watches you’re sent. According to Watch Gang, each new timepiece you receive is worth five times your monthly or quarterly membership cost, but I’m somewhat skeptical of this claim. I’d say 2-3 times your membership cost is a more accurate measure of value for the watches you are sent.
Watch Gang offers subscribers the ability to go on a monthly or quarterly plan, which, frankly, I wish more subscription services would do. This way, if you don’t want a new watch every month, you still have a relatively easy and passive way to let your watch collection grow at a reasonable price.
And if you’re not into the monthly or quarterly subscription idea, Watch Gang also has a regular old e-commerce store where you can purchase the watches from the brands they carry directly.
WATCH GANG PRICING TIERS
As of this writing, Watch Gang has three pricing tiers for the general public.
Original Tier – $49.99 / month
- Fashionable watches from lower-tier brands
- Japanese or Swiss movement
- Eligible for all giveaways
- Monthly and quarterly options available
- Watches worth up to $150
Black Tier – $99.99 / month
- Premium microbrands
- Large name brands
- Japanese or Swiss movement
- Eligible for all giveaways
- Monthly and quarterly options available
- Watches worth up to $500
Platinum Tier – $299.99 / month
- Premium Microbrands and Large name brands
- Japanese or Swiss movement
- Eligible for all giveaways
- Monthly and quarterly options available
- Watches worth up to $1500
MY EXPERIENCE WITH WATCH GANG
I can’t say that I’ve experienced the entire Watch Gang customer experience as I was simply sent some watches in the mail for the purposes of this review. Still, if these watches are representative of the various tiers that the service offers, I was fairly impressed with the quality of the timepieces sent my way.
The first watch was a Filippo Loreti – Ascari Moss Chronograph. Oddly enough, I reviewed this watch in detail about a year ago and came away fairly impressed with its quality. The model I received came in the Indigo Rose gold, a slightly more expensive variant of this watch, retailing for $319 US. It’s a very nice mid-tier Chronograph with features like water resistance up to 100 meters, a unidirectional turning bezel, Sapphire coated mineral glass and luminous hands and indexes. But if you want to know more about the Ascari Moss, read my full review.
The second watch I received was from a brand called Nubeo, a company I had not heard of before, and that’s probably more indicative of the entire Watch Gang experience. The watch in question is the Megalodon Limited Edition in Emerald Green. Retailing for $1,250 US, this watch was clearly from Watch Gang’s Platinum tier. A quick scouring of eBay and a few other watch auction sites didn’t reveal any other Megalodon pieces for sale, so I can’t be sure how well this brand holds up in value on reseller marketplaces.
That said, the Megalodon from Nubeo is a very nice automatic watch, with a weight perhaps rivalling my Nixon 51-30 Chrono tide watch. A gorgeous and bulbous sapphire lens with anti-reflective coating stands out immediately, but beyond that, the 316L solid stainless steel case does a lot of the aesthetic work here. With a 46mm case diameter and a 20mm case thickness, this is not a watch for people with small wrists; it’s a beast of a watch and worthy of its prehistoric giant name. Overall, I was quite impressed with this timepiece and was particularly struck by the double-layered dial, the incorporation of a shark fin as a part of the hands, as well as the exaggerated coin-edge on the unidirectional bezel.
IS WATCH GANG WORTH IT?
I think the answer to this question depends entirely on where you are on your watch collecting journey. If you’re somewhat new to this world or are still working your way up to the big-name brands like Omega, Seiko, IWC, Breitling and others, Watch Gang is an excellent way to start building up your collection. You’ll be exposed to a lot of micro-brands and perhaps fall in love with a company’s timepieces you’ve never heard of before.
That said, if you’re a serious watch collector, you’re most likely to be disappointed with the lack of larger, well-known brands that are most common to the Watch Gang experience. There is an entire subreddit for Watch Gang members where subscribers discuss their experience. Some are quite happy and surprised with the pieces they receive, while others are quite disappointed with the level of timepieces they’ve gotten, deriding them as having come from “fringe” brands.
Again, I think your level of watch-collecting sophistication will almost entirely dictate the experience you have with Watch Gang.
If you want to know exactly what kind of watches to expect, you can better understand what customers have previously received by going here.
PROS OF WATCH GANG
- An affordable way to build your watch collection
- New brand discovery
- Three tiers of subscription
- Monthly and quarterly options available
- Worldwide shipping
- Excellent customer service
CONS OF WATCH GANG
- Not for serious watch collectors
- A lot of unknown brands
- No ability to set size preferences
- You get what you get and can’t exchange watches for something else other than credit
WHEEL OF WATCHES
One other feature of the Watch Gang website is something called the Wheel of Watches. It’s an interesting gamified mechanic where you can buy into “spinning” a virtual roulette wheel to receive a watch. There are different kinds of wheels you can spin with corresponding dollar amounts you must spend to spin, and that dictates the types of watches you can add to the wheel.
- Wheel 1 – $72.00 USD
- Wheel 2 – $160.00 USD
- Wheel 3 – $285.00 USD
- Wheel 4 – $385.00 USD
- Wheel 5 – $585.00 USD
While it’s an interesting way to provide customers with a way to get the thrill of potentially getting more value from what they put in, I have to ask myself, who would use this? And why? All spins are final, and there is absolutely zero transparency behind how this mechanism works. Is it truly a random spin with the slices representing your chances of getting one of the watches you want? Or are the wheel slices merely visually representative, and the algorithm that dictates your chances is skewed towards always receiving the lowest value watch?
I would love to see Watch Gang be more transparent about how this Wheel of Watches mechanic works to give customers more confidence about buying into it.
