Is the Steel Sports Watch Era Over? Here’s What the Data Says

This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.

At my heart, I am a man of science. The son of a developmental and cell biology major who carried a periodic table in his wallet (true story). And while intuition and taste help inform what I cover in this newsletter, at the end of the day there’s nothing sturdier to me than data. And, like Al Pacino announcing an Oscars winner, my eyes saw that the recent rash of new releases was filled with fewer steel watches than they have in a while. So I crunched the numbers—and what I found should scare the pants off Big Steel. (Hold another L, Charles Miner.)

I’m not kidding when I said I crunched the numbers. I tossed 72 new releases from Watches & Wonders into an Excel spreadsheet to see what I could divine from this mass of novelties. (Much more below on size, complications, and color.) What really popped out was the glaring lack of watches made in stainless steel. Let’s pass the mic to Steve Kornacki for the numbers breakdown.

Out of the 72 biggest releases from the 19 biggest brands—Rolex, Tudor, Patek, IWC, Tag Heuer, Cartier, etc.—only 20 have stainless steel cases. To put that into perspective, I tallied up just the new releases from Rolex and Tudor last year and found that those two brands alone announced 14 watches in steel (including two-tone, gold-and-steel pieces). That’s incredible! The fall off of steel watches at Rolex, the King of Sports, is what really makes my head spin. Only one new Rolex—the headlining “Bruce Wayne” GMT-Master—was made in steel, the dominant material in watches until very recently.

So does this mean that sport watches are disappearing? On the contrary: Sport watches seem just as popular as ever, but they’re now getting material upgrades. Rolex’s debuts, for instance, are flush with its sport models made out of higher-grade stuff—the chunky Deepsea in gold, two white-gold Daytonas, and a pair of Sky-Dwellers in rose and yellow gold. What this tells me is that the market is leaning even more heavily into the luxury sport realm, which has been buoyed mainly by the Patek Philippe Nautilus and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak over the past couple of years.

Another big reason for steel’s drop off is the rise of lightweight titanium. I tallied 12 watches—including high-end models like Vacheron Constantin’s Overseas Tourbillon, as well as more entry-level fare like Zenith’s Defy Extreme Diver—that opted for titanium where you’d typically find steel.

The last nugget I gleaned from steel’s tumble is how responsive these brands have been to recent trends. Over the past year, collectors have continued to wrap opulent vintage models in an ever-tighter bear hug. The trend toward vintage is not just pushing brands to offer smaller case sizes, but also conjuring new examples that are more extreme in their use of gold, diamonds, and precious stones. The white-gold, gem-set Daytonas with mother-of-pearl dials are perfect examples of that.

OK, onto the rest of my data set. (This is my last Watches & Wonders-themed post, I promise, but if I’m still accidentally dropping oui into everyday conversation the statute of limitations isn’t yet up.)

The average watch size is—drumroll please—staying the same

I’m sure you’ll remember, because you’re a loyal Box + Papers reader (thank you), but I recently conducted a big survey that compared the sizes of 230 new releases from 2019 to 2023. I calculated that the average watch size in 2023 was 40.5 mm, only a slight deviation from years past. Well, you are gonna love this: the average size of the 72 new watches I examined is exactly 40.5 mm. What are the chances?

My survey doesn’t include some of the super-small outlier models, like Cartier’s mini Tanks or Hublot’s fun-sized Classic Fusions, which would have warped the data. But across the board, all of the brands I included in my spreadsheet made efforts to debut watches around 36 mm.

Blue is the watchiest color

The dominant color coming out of W&W was blue. Nineteen of the new watches came in blue, 17 in black, 11 in silver, and 10 in green. Blue and black’s rise to the top of these charts is helped in no small part by a couple of brands resetting their core collections. IWC, which uses fancy names for these colors like “obsidian” and “horizon,” and Oris both debuted sets of watches in blue and black.

Premium materials = premium price

I haven’t done this for previous versions of the fair, but it stands to reason that steel’s downfall would mean higher prices. Even the brands known for making entry-level pieces are trying to grappling hook their way into luxury price tiers, like Tudor with its $32,100 green-gold Black Bay 58. The average price in my survey came out to $51,254—and that’s not including the many pieces listed as “price-upon-request,” which would inevitably push this number higher.

It’s a date

A quick word on complications before we go. A date function—which many watchmakers will tell you clients want in a modern watch, even if purists believe it mucks up a dial—is still by far the most popular complication. Twenty-five of the novelties include a date window, 17 have a chronograph, and nine can clock multiple time zones through either a GMT or dual time feature. Another data point that stood out to me was that 11 new watches in my survey were time-only pieces.

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Originally Appeared on GQ