Tired of your watches? Try swapping straps

Jason Lee

I come into contact with a lot of watches. That’s the privilege (and the occupational hazard) of being both an enthusiast and a journalist: there’s always something new to handle, photograph, write about, and compare against what you already own. Over more than ten years of collecting, one pattern keeps repeating, however: I’ve never managed to hold onto a watch for more than five years.

The reason isn’t complicated. The honeymoon phase fades. A new watch sharpens your attention: the way a case edge catches light, how the dial reads in different conditions, the little rituals of winding or setting. Then, one day, you realise it’s become normal. You put it on without thinking. And if you’re wired like a collector, “normal” can feel uncomfortably close to “time to move on”.

I felt that familiar drift recently with my Hublot Spirit of Big Bang Frosted Carbon, which I picked up around three months ago. It arrived on its stock Velcro fabric strap: an all-black pairing that felt spot on. The case has that matte, speckled texture you get from carbon composites, and the strap leaned into the watch’s modern, technical character. Comfortable, easy to adjust, visually coherent. If there’s such a thing as the obvious strap for this watch, that was it.

But after wearing that same black-on-black setup day in, day out, familiarity crept in. Not boredom, exactly, more like the watch had become part of the uniform. The strap that initially felt like the “right” choice started to feel like the only choice. In the past, this is where I’d start thinking about moving the watch on. Not out of dissatisfaction, but out of that collector’s need to reset: to trade familiarity for novelty. This time I tried a different approach. Instead of asking what I should buy next, I asked what I could change about the experience I already had.

The answer turned out to be simple: change the strap

I swapped the Velcro for a rubber strap and, almost instantly, the watch felt different on the wrist. Rubber has more structure than fabric, and it holds a cleaner line from case to wrist — something that matters on a watch with strong geometry. Where Velcro reads as relaxed and utilitarian, rubber reads as more deliberate. The fit shifted, too. The Spirit of Big Bang sat with a little more stability, and the whole watch felt slightly more “complete”.

What surprised me most wasn’t the look, but the attention it brought back. I found myself checking the time for the same reason I did on day one: because I wanted to look at the watch. The carbon texture seemed sharper against the smoother strap surface. The monochrome theme stayed intact, but the silhouette changed, and the watch picked up a different attitude. Same watch, reframed.

That’s why strap changes punch above their weight in collecting. A strap isn’t a minor accessory; it’s one of the main interfaces between you and the watch. It dictates comfort, temperature, flexibility, and how a watch behaves during an ordinary day. It also changes the visual story you’re telling. Put the same watch on fabric, rubber, leather, or a bracelet, and it can move between worlds — without touching the case or the dial.

There’s also something practical about it. Collecting can easily turn into a cycle of buy, wear, sell, repeat. Sometimes that’s part of the fun, but it can also make you forget that a watch has more than one way to be worn. If the reason you bought the watch is still there — the design, the fit, the mood — it’s worth trying a strap change before you decide the watch has run its course.

Will this strap swap keep me with the Hublot for five years? I honestly don’t know. But right now I’m not thinking about what comes next. I’m enjoying what I already have, again. And it’s a reminder that sometimes the simplest tweak is the one that brings the spark back.