The Time+Tide Team shares their 2025 watch resolutions

Time+Tide

The humble New Year’s resolution can be a powerful thing. Even if many resolutions end up broken sooner rather than later, the mental exercise of assessing your life and committing to improvements can still be helpful. It’s a bit like a coin toss, where you might end up ignoring the results, but it can help you realise what result you actually wanted all along. Well, Buffy got curious about how a New Year’s resolution could be applied to our watch collection journeys, saving goals, or even just wearing habits – and we thought that was an interesting idea, so we all got involved. Here are our 2025 watch resolutions.

Buffy: to buy a Cartier and actually keep it

I fooled myself once, and there was shame on me. I fooled myself again, and the shame compounded. When I fooled myself a third time, the embarrassment was way stronger than any of the shame that had come before it. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the fact that I have owned and sold three Cartier watches in my time. The first was a Cartier Pasha ref. 1033 with an 18k yellow gold diving bezel and a power reserve indicator on the dial. I fell in love with its quirkiness and oddball character that made it seem like the kind of watch a magician should wear. I even had custom straps made for it, as the original alligator leather was confiscated by customs when it was shipped. Unfortunately, I had also fallen in love with the Cartier Tank Basculante.

Along with another watch or two, I sold the Pasha to fund the purchase of the Tank Basculante whose flippable case fascinated me, and I indulged in using it as a miniature desk clock wherever possible. The love was unfortunate because it didn’t last. It may have had something to do with the steel case no longer having the two-tone gold look that I craved, or maybe it was just that the Pasha was truly the watch for me. In any case, I ended up selling the Tank, and that money went towards other hobbies. My third Cartier was a recent development, and it was when I stumbled across an eBay auction for a 25mm Santos Octagon in fairly rough shape. For only A$800 though, I couldn’t resist. I fixed the broken crown myself at home, and it was as good as new except for the scratches and spiderwebbing of the lacquer dial, all of which made me love it even more. However, I was pretty short on money and soon to be getting engaged, so I sold it.

In an attempt to fill the Cartier-shaped hole in my heart, I bought a vintage Credor that makes for a compelling Santos homage, and while I do love it, it just isn’t a Cartier. To make matters worse, I only realised after selling it that the Santos Octagon is worn in one of my favourite films, 1996’s Bound by the Wachowski sisters. So, my 2025 resolution is to buy a Cartier and make sure I don’t sell it, no matter how desperately I want to buy something else. Prices for the Pasha ref. 1033 spiked far too high after the Pasha collection was revived in 2020, but getting another Santos Octagon should be feasible within the year.

Borna: to service my vintage Zodiac Astrographic SST

Servicing a vintage watch can be hard, especially if it’s not your bog-standard three-hander. Well, the Astrographic SST is anything but ordinary, and least of all because it looks like a space helmet that might’ve come out of the 1960s Star Trek design studios. This retrofuturistic darling is also equipped with an automatic, high-beat, 5 Hz movement based on an A. Schild 1688 – a manually wound, 3Hz calibre produced in the 1960s. Named the Zodiac 88D, it’s a result of a co-development between Doxa, Eberhard, Girard-Perregaux, Favre-Leuba, and of course, Zodiac. The difficult thing with such an obscure movement is that parts are scarce, and of the four watchmakers I’ve taken it to, one just made a meal of it, and three refused to touch it, and unfortunately my servicing skills are not up to the task of repairing the winding works.

Despite having all-original parts including the bracelet, crown, and crystal (though someone incorrectly installed it at a 90-degree offset), I just haven’t been able to wear it because the crown is at risk of falling out at any moment. As a result, this awesome-looking piece that’s bursting with ’70s nostalgia has just been sitting in one of my watch boxes. Other than looking like nothing else, this piece is also near and dear to my heart, as it was the first watch gifted to me by my partner. While I’ve been lucky that it wasn’t the last gift watch she gave me, I definitely want to restore it to its past glory and wear it regularly, so as much as this is a resolution made official, it’s also a plea. If you know a watchmaker that would be up for the challenge – please get in touch.

Jamie: to buy a vintage mechanical watch for the first time

This might be slightly sacrilegious to admit as the editor of a watch publication, but I’ve never bought a vintage mechanical watch. I own a vintage mechanical watch (my grandfather’s Eterna-Matic Dato) and I’ve bought vintage quartz watches (including a bunch of Seiko Grand Quartzes that have all conked out on me as well as some early Swatches) but I’ve never hunted down and acquired a vintage mechanical piece, either manually wound or automatic, for myself. Maybe it’s a slightly arbitrary distinction, but I do feel as if it’s a step I need to make in my watch-collecting journey.

It’s not for a lack of trying, though. Zach and Borna have been the angel and devil on my shoulders respectively as I’ve bothered the pair of them over the last 12 months with endless Loupe This listings or eBay finds. What I really need in my collection is a proper mechanical dress watch, and I’ve lusted over many 70s-era white gold Audemars Piguets and Vacheron Constantins but never quite bit the bullet on buying. Where my decision becomes harder is that I’m also looking at contemporary vintage-inspired pieces like the echo/neutra Rivanera or the Furlan Marri Disco Volante… Hopefully, in 2025, I’ll get off the fence and just buy something.

Zach: to give my less-worn watches some love, or get rid of them

We all talk about the honeymoon period we have with our watches when a new piece comes into our collections, but we don’t really discuss the far too often periods where we take breaks from pieces we once honeymooned with only to leave them later collecting dust in a box. Forever watch my a**. I have certainly fallen victim to impulse watch purchases, finding myself completely in lust at the moment of arrival to only be in “meh” a few weeks or months later. “It’s not you, it’s me,” I tell such watches, as I prepare them for hibernation in my watch box. But I strongly advocate against keeping watches you never wear, at least if they are not museum pieces meant to be stored. So I need to put my money where my mouth is and do a little bit of an audit of my collection.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, as I recently have found myself putting a piece back on that I hadn’t worn in months only to regain the spark and rediscover its place within my wear-roster. After a few big acquisitions over the last 18 months and the honeymoon periods that come with it, I find myself being better about rotating each day with fewer repeats within a week. And, in this return of ritual and discipline, I will be able to find a sense and evaluate whether or not a watch, after being returned to the wrist a few times, is worth keeping or finding a new home for.

Pietro: to expand my collection with something that’s not a manually wound, thin dress piece

I had a very atypical start in my watch-collecting journey in that the first proper watch I got was a Grand Seiko dress piece and I haven’t moved much from that genre since. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all kinds of watches, but I’ve definitely got a type when collecting. Borna promptly points that out whenever I’m sending him stuff and vice-versa. “Don’t worry, I’ve got some manual-winding stuff for you too,” has been one of the latest texts he sent me.

And I get it, I should diversify a bit. But I guarantee you that I don’t necessarily look for them. I like to dress up more than dress casually, so an elegant watch does the job, and I guess not wearing a watch when I’m doing any kind of physical activity has a role in that too. Maybe I should start doing that first, and then the different kinds of watches will follow. So, while not getting too many watches always stands as a general rule, I’ll try my best to get an automatic as my next watch. While going completely out of my comfort zone could eventually work, I think I’ll need a thin model to make the leap smaller. If you have any recommendations for a wearable sporty piece, please let me know!

Russell: to finally sell the watches I no longer wear

I recently published my most worn watches of 2024, and outside of those three – my Oris, Tudor and Universal Genève – there is only really one more watch in my collection that I regularly wear, and that’s my vintage Swatch Spot Flash from 1991. But I have three more watches sitting in my watch box doing absolutely nothing for me. I’ve outgrown them, I don’t feel like I have any situations I would prefer to wear them than the other four watches I’ve just mentioned, and so now all I’m left with is that they make my watch box look full. If these watches were of any significant value in the watch world (if sold today they would all cost under £500 each) then I would have handed them over to a trusted dealer by now and asked them to take care of the sale. However, given the relatively low cost, there is no dealer I know of that would take them, so it falls to me to pull together a full eBay listing for each one and go through the task of dealing with everything that comes with that.

I’m not a big eBay buyer or seller, so the thought of going through the whole process feels rather daunting to me. But 2025 is a year of sound financial decisions for me, and so I need to liquidate these watches while there is still some form of monetary value left in them. So hopefully I’ll be back here next year telling you about how I sold them, I’ve bought a house, and now I’m back to spending my money more irresponsibly on watches more than twice my age. But who knows what 2025 will have in store for us all?