How to Choose a Watch Box
If you own two or more watches or if you’re at all serious about watch collecting, a good watch box is highly recommended. It will keep your watches warm and comfy and safe, and it’s much better to keep your collection in a watch box than to let the watches bang around in a drawer or on a dresser. But, there are a few features you definitely want to look for in a watch box, not all watch boxes are created equal. Here’s one tip though, spend the extra money and get the best watch box you can, it will definitely pay in the end. It’s very easy to spend more than you should and end up very disappointed.
Watch boxes come in aluminum, leather, wood and even plastic. The aluminum box looks industrial, and it’s well built. It holds 18 watches, and it has fairly strong hinges on the side and dual locks in the front, but the problem is that it has these very cheap and weak pillows inside. It’s not recommended buying any watch box with this type of pillow. Unfortunately, though, this type of cheap pillow is commonly found in many different watch boxes, as a way for the manufacturer to save money. You can see that the watches don’t sit on the pillows properly; there is no way you can get the watches straight. The pillows are just too wimpy, especially the larger watches, they’re just too big for the pillows and also the box lid hits them when it’s closed.
Here’s perfect watch box, it’s made from very nice wood. It has beautiful and strong wood framing inside, and these are 10 millimeter thick separators. The pockets are very generous, and they’re lined with felt as are the pillows. The pillows are thick and firm, and they’re even adjustable for different size watches. This type of watch box can be expensive, but if you’re patient, you can find them on sale or used at a great discount. This one can be open with one hand, and you can see that these very large watches like the Zodiac Oceanaire and the Vostok 1967 Amphibia fit with no problem on the big thick pillows and in the big deep pockets.
This other wood watch box looks nice and it holds 20 watches, but the wood is thinner and cheaper, and the separators are made from cardboard with cheap final covering. This box is better than the aluminum box, but not as good as the felt line box. Also, the watch compartments in this box are shallower than the felt line wooden box, so the larger dive watches don’t fit, and the bottom drawer simply falls right out if the box is tilted. Also, the depth of the drawer is deceiving, it’s shallower than it looks, so it won’t hold a larger dive watches. I also need two hands to open the lid. The pillows in this one aren’t that bad, they’re adequately sized and they’re vinyl covered, but they’re not adjustable. This box also doesn’t have as much room inside as you might think.
Here’s the difference in the pillows, the pillow on the left is the nice felt-covered style, and the vinyl-covered pillow is shown on the right. Check this out, the center of the felt pillow can be removed for smaller watches, which is a great feature. The pillow is big enough for a dive watch, but it may be too big for smaller dress watches so that the center part can be used instead for a dress watch or a woman’s watch. Here’s one of the soft mushy pillows from the aluminum box, you can see there’s just no contest, a peanut would collapse this thing. It has no body and no shape to it. You can see the pillows basically do nothing, they just don’t support the watches at all.
The wooden felt-covered box also has very deep and wide pockets, which works for any watch compared to the aluminum box where the watches are just tilted all over. Also, the vinyl pillow watch box isn’t deep enough to hold the larger dive watches.
I have a ton of watches that are just laying around on my makeup table and it’s driving me nuts! The Glenor leather watch box looks so minimal and sleek, that would be just perfect, I don’t like color or flashy pieces, I want something that will blend with my decor.