By Matt Alagiah
Chris Salih is a diehard watch collector. He runs the YouTube channel WatchChris and founded the New York community Gotham Watch Club. In late 2024, when he created a WhatsApp group for members to geek out on their favorite models and discuss wishlists, he discovered a new level of fandom. The group has since grown to 200 members, and even Salih is surprised by the degree of engagement.
"There are times when I've been in a meeting for two hours, and 1,000 messages have come in," said Salih, whose day job is in finance. "These are people during their work day. They're obsessed."
Much of this activity consists of collectors posting pictures of their wrists, showcasing their latest ticker. "You're talking about people who already have 50 watches in the drawer and they're buying another one. It's a little bit of a sickness," said Salih. "There are a lot of angry spouses out there because of groups like these," he added.
Over the past few years, private WhatsApp groups like Salih's have started to shape and accelerate trends, influence brands and sometimes replace the watch media and traditional dealers. Many of these group chats are founded by influential industry folks as a way for like-minded collectors to connect, share thoughts on new releases and news, and show off their favorite models -- as well as to buy and sell.
An avid collector might be in several -- perhaps one for their city and a few that are national or global. The catch? They're extremely exclusive.
'Harder to get into than Harvard'
Ted Lape, 61, an investment banker in Columbus, Ohio, is in a WhatsApp group called "Tim, Kate & Friends," run by the well-known collector Tim Mancuso and his wife, Kate. Lape said one member described their group, which has fewer than 100 members, as "harder to get into than Harvard," his alma mater. "We've got guys who have collections probably [worth] over a million dollars," said Lape.
James Schaaf is the co-founder of CollectorSphere, an invitation-only platform in Lausanne, Switzerland, that arranges events, meet-ups and brand visits for collectors. "We largely communicate on a WhatsApp group, " he said. On a weekly basis, he may get between 35 and 70 requests to join the 300-strong community. New joiners are "extremely vetted."
New members are usually accepted through a referral process. Tim Green, head of commercial at Subdial, a London-based trading platform for watches, said this is mainly for security, because members are often sharing their names, phone numbers and details of eye-wateringly valuable watches.
Zoë Abelson, the New York-based founder of luxury watch dealer Graal, set up one of the most well-known WhatsApp groups, "Off Duty," in 2021. Today it has 722 members around the world. You won't find a link to join anywhere public. "It is all word of mouth," she said.
'A different kind of flex'
Collectors in these group chats often find that their opinions shift. Navin Jain, 28, a dentist based between Spain and Hong Kong, started collecting watches eight years ago. Two years ago, he joined the "Watch Chat" group set up by the content creator @kingflum with around 120 members. Before joining, he viewed watches such as the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona "Panda" ($16,900 for the latest model) as highly desirable. "But when you're in these circles, it's no longer rare. All these guys have one," he said. The group "opened up my eyes to the world of independent watchmaking."
Jain is waiting for his first watch by independent Swiss brand F.P. Journe, the Élégante model (about $22,540), to be delivered, and he has his eyes on a C by Romain Gauthier with an openwork dial (about $62,610). The latter is the current "group watch," he said, meaning the group's most popular watch right now.
Dale Rabinowitz, a 38-year-old New Yorker who works in the pharmaceutical business in Manchester, U.K., is in Off Duty. He's "obsessed" with the Swiss brand Krayon. In his group, he said, "you see people wearing [brands like Krayon] a lot more than Rolex and Cartier." Salih agrees: "There's nothing wrong with Rolex, AP [Audemars Piguet] or Patek Philippe. Lots of the guys in the club own these brands. But they don't post them. They're posting something offbeat that you've never seen before." In WhatsApp groups, he added, "it's about how rare it is. It's a different kind of flex."
Rabinowitz said Off Duty members regularly show off watches worth half a million dollars. "I'm on a couple of waiting lists now for expensive watches that a year ago, I would have thought, 'I'm never going to buy.' But lo and behold, I'm now willing to sell a kidney to get an Otsuka Lotec Number 9," he said, referencing a watch that retails for over $100,000.
A new trading platform
WhatsApp is becoming a place where watches are bought, sold and traded. It might sound risky, but there's a high level of trust among these groups. A guy in Lape's group chat lent him his MB & F Legacy Machine Perpetual (which retails for around $200,000). "There is pretty much nobody in my group that I would not buy a watch from [or] sell a watch to," said Salih.
These groups are "really good at setting up peer-to-peer trades," said Green.
WhatsApp group founders can enjoy commercial benefits. Abelson posts messages "listing watches I have for sale and am looking to source. I get a lot of business through those posts." Brands occasionally pay CollectorSphere for specialist reports, for which its members contribute insights. Salih sometimes charges brands a fee for access to his community.
Now these groups are growing offshoots. Lape launched his own group in Columbus with 20 members. Salih has launched London and Long Island chapters of his Gotham Watch Club, which have approximately 40 and 60 members, respectively.
Giancarlo Rosselli runs the Watch Society, an umbrella for global watch communities, and set up the Atlanta chapter in 2021, which has a WhatsApp group of about 450 members. He is helping to start new chapters (and chats) across the country, and in the Bahamas, Zurich and Dubai. These groups are proliferating in large part due to their sense of community, he said. "You come for the watches, but you stay for the people."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 03, 2026 12:50 ET (16:50 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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