Tom Chng on What People Get Wrong About the Watch Community
Tom Chng is building a watch community where anyone interested in horology is welcome to join.
If there’s one preconceived notion about watch clubs, it’s that they’re reserved for the elite: serious collectors with serious pieces and serious money to back them up. It’s easy to see why. Put a group of watch enthusiasts in a room and, sooner or later, someone is going to be wearing something that costs more than your car.
Tom Chng gets it. “You see rare or very expensive watches at our gatherings, so from the outside I can understand why someone might assume there’s some sort of monetary threshold for entry,” says Chng. “But there isn’t.”
In fact, Chng would rather spend an evening with someone who owns one inexpensive watch and is completely fascinated by it, than someone with an enormous collection of expensive pieces who has little interest in learning or sharing.
For him, the value of a watch collection has little to do with its price tag. It is the curiosity and interest behind it that matters. “You don’t need an impressive watch collection to have an interesting perspective,” says Chng.
For Chng, that distinction comes from his own experience with watches. His first serious watch was a steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual Date, produced in 2000 and purchased in 2012. But his fascination with watches was never purely about the mechanics, or the watches themselves. It was the emotional weight they often carried — as heirlooms passed down through generations, symbols of achievement and markers of personal milestones.
At the same time, Chng found collecting to be a fairly solitary hobby. In the early days of Instagram, he used the platform to connect with other enthusiasts online, but thought it would be much more fun to actually meet in person. And so Singapore Watch Club (SWC) began — not with a grand ambition to build a community, nor any plan to turn it into what it is today. He simply wanted more people to talk watches with.
And that was it. In late 2015, eight new friends who had found one another through a shared interest in watches gathered for the first time. “It was basically some watches on a table, drinks and a bunch of people who get unnecessarily excited about tiny mechanical objects,” says Chng.
Within the first couple of years, SWC’s monthly get-togethers were already attracting 40 to 50 people. Today, the basic formula hasn’t changed. SWC still brings passionate people together and gives them something they genuinely want to talk about. The difference is that, 11 years on, the conversations have grown considerably beyond the watches on the table.
SWC now organises manufacture visits, private viewings, master classes, CEO conferences and collaborations with brands that include Ulysse Nardin, Hublot, Cartier and Vacheron Constantin.
One of its most significant projects was undertaken to celebrate the club’s eighth anniversary, in collaboration with Vacheron Constantin. At the time, members of the group owned 15 examples of the brand’s Historiques Chronograph ref. 47101, a discontinued model from the 1990s. The watches were sent back to Vacheron Constantin’s manufacture in Geneva to be restored and overhauled, with each receiving a discreet commemorative bridge decorated by its Métiers d’Art artisans.
“The idea was essentially: Must a special edition always be a new watch?” explains Chng. “Instead of creating something new for the sake of novelty, we celebrated something that had already been made beautifully in the past.”
It was an appropriately watch-nerdy project, but for Chng, it represented something bigger. “I think that project says quite a lot about how SWC, and perhaps all of us as collectors, had matured.”
Yet Chng doesn’t measure growth by numbers or even by the increasingly elaborate experiences SWC is able to offer. The more meaningful measure, he says, is what happens outside the club.
People may first find one another through a shared interest in watches. But over time, the reason for showing up can change. They might come curious to see what is on someone’s wrist, and eventually stay because they want to know more about the person wearing it. That, Chng believes, is the secret to what keeps the group going. “You can organise the most spectacular event imaginable, but you can’t sustain a community on novelty forever. There has to be a genuine human connection,” he says.
That connection is made more interesting by the fact that SWC is not a group of people who think alike. It is made up of all sorts — serious collectors, vintage specialists, photographers, writers and deeply technical enthusiasts, including individuals who can work on watches themselves. There are also those who are only beginning their collecting journey. Different generations, professions, personalities and, naturally, very different collections all end up around the same table.
And perhaps that is where the fun lies. One person might know everything about vintage chronographs, while another’s expertise might lie in independent watchmaking, design or movement construction. Everyone can learn from everyone else. As Chng puts it, a community would become rather boring if everyone thought and collected in exactly the same way.
There is also something inherently interesting about building a community around an object that can so easily become associated with wealth and status. Chng admits that watches naturally attract a certain amount of ego: They are expensive, visible and, for some, a status indicator. The challenge is retaining the enthusiasm while keeping the entitlement at bay.
“If you allow the conversation to become about who owns the most expensive watch, you’ve completely missed what makes the hobby interesting,” says Chng. Instead, he has tried to build SWC around three values: passion, sincerity and humility.
It is a philosophy that also shapes how Chng thinks newcomers should approach watches. His advice is not to rush out and buy one. Instead, see as many as possible first. “Go into boutiques. Visit vintage dealers. Go to exhibitions. Try watches on. Read. Ask stupid questions. We’ve all asked them,” he says.
The internet has made an enormous amount of information available, but Chng thinks it has also made it easy to outsource one’s personal taste. Instead, he asks beginners to, “learn enough to understand what you’re looking at, then pay attention to what keeps drawing you back.”
After all, developing your own taste may be one of the most enjoyable parts of collecting. And perhaps that is the real point of a watch club: not to tell you what to buy, but to give you more people to learn from while figuring out what you like for yourself.
