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Editor’s Note: A break this week from reader submissions of our ongoing 3 for 5k column to make room for an entry from Worn & Wound contributor Cait Bazemore.
Cait is a watch industry veteran and her choices reflect her experience in the space in an interesting way. Specifically, they are all tied to her connections with the people behind the brands. This is a phenomenon most of us who work in watches for any length of time eventually come to understand. It just feels good to support the people we connect with (even when it’s hypothetical support for a Worn & Wound column). And honestly, this isn’t exclusive to watch industry professionals. Anyone who has attended a Windup event or any other watch fair and taken a minute to speak with a brand owner can probably relate.
Today, I notch another rite of passage as a contributor at Worn & Wound: my three-watch collection for under $5,000. The mission is clear, but I have to be honest, it was much more challenging than I expected. This exercise taught me a lot about myself, what I value, and how that actually translates to a dollar figure.
I’ll confess, I realized a majority of my most desired watches sit around the $2,700 to $3,300 range – multiply that times three, and the total is well over the $5,000 mark. I had to carefully consider three timepieces that fell roughly around $1,500 each and that would make a well-rounded three-watch collection: a dress watch, a sport watch, and a wild card seemed like obvious choices. However, beyond the practicalities in terms of style, what I found in contemplating this price bracket is that my connection to the brand itself carried a lot of weight.
The three brands I’ve chosen are ones where I know the founders, their vision, and exactly why they created these models – these elements are something you can’t assign a price tag to. So, without further ado, here’s my 3 under $5k lineup.
The Sport Watch: The Wren Diver 38, $1,595
There’s something special about a brand built by a true enthusiast. Wren’s founder Craig Karger was a successful attorney in New York City who loved watches. He started a simple Instagram account (aptly named Wrist Enthusiast) back in 2015 to document his collecting journey, and a decade later, he’s gone on to build an equally successful career in the watch industry – one that’s expanded from the digital landscape to the wrist with the launch of his own brand.
I’ve been lucky enough to follow Wren closely since its inception in 2023. Craig is a designer who loves feedback and never hesitates to share prototypes and take in constructive criticism. I’ve seen first-hand the attention to detail he puts into tweaking and improving his models with each product run since the debut of his initial diver, the Diver One.
The Diver 38 is the next evolution – a more versatile and compact version of the original, paring down the proportions from 41mm to 38mm. The Diver 38 also offers the option of either date or no date. With watches at this price point it really does come down to the minutia. There are a couple things that stand out to me about the Diver 38 and that make it such a great value proposition.
From the original Diver One, we see a few key improvements: an upgrade to Super-LumiNova Grade X1 lume, an enhanced bezel now in ceramic, and perhaps the most important of them all, an improved bracelet with a micro-adjust system. For me, bracelets are the make-or-break component of an affordable watch (more to say on that later in a dedicated story), and Wren’s is solid and sturdy, not flimsy, which instantly elevates this $1,595 watch well above its price tag.
The Dress Watch: The Buci Garde-Temps, $1,350
There are very few female-owned watch brands out there, and Buci is one of them. Yet, this wasn’t the thing that initially drew me to the brand – in fact, it was an even smaller subset of the watch industry: the crossover between watch enthusiasts and poets.
Nousseima Baraket, founder of Buci, and myself are two among a small handful of folks in the watch industry who are also poets. Nousseima has lived and breathed watchmaking from a young age, hailing from the Franche-Comte region, a mainstay of French watchmaking located on the border with Switzerland. However, her first love (like mine) was language. This intersection of her upbringing and her passion for words and literature got her to thinking, and she decided to wrap watchmaking craftsmanship in poetry, thus Buci was born.
Buci has done a few collaborations since the brand’s founding in 2022, but its core collection is simply named Garde-Temps. This is a timeless dress watch with 38mm proportions and a no-frills design with a clean, legible dial available in three neutral colors: brick, green, and beige. The poetry comes into play most literally on the strap. Here, the leather gets embossed either more prominently on the outside or more discreetly on the inside (your choice) with the option of four different lines of poetry.
I first met Nousseima at Geneva Watch Days in 2024 after having read about Buci’s collaboration with seconde/seconde earlier that year. After speaking with her and witnessing both her genuine passion for watchmaking and her unwavering commitment to bring something truly authentic, unique, artistic, and extremely thoughtful to the industry, I was sold and bought one of the watches on the spot. Nousseima and Buci are such a great example of why this industry so desperately needs cross-disciplinarity inspiration and fresh perspectives.
The Wild Card: The Papar Anillo GMT, $750
You may remember when I covered Papar’s inaugural launch, the Anillo GMT, back in 2024. Still, two years later, there are very few watches that have delighted and surprised me as much as this one. I’ll admit, before seeing it in the metal, I received the press kit, and on the page, it wasn’t immediately doing much for me, but that’s the kicker in this industry – nothing really compares to strapping it on your wrist.
The Anillo GMT somehow marries several different seemingly disconnected layers of inspiration into one cohesive design that just works: brutalist architecture, paper planes, a reimagining the sector dial, the iconic smiley face, and the nostalgia that pulls at the heartstrings of every watch enthusiast in one way or another. Yes, at a glance, the items in this list admittedly sound a bit all over the place, but Josh Blank, the founder of Papar and creator of the Anillo GMT, somehow brings them together in beautiful harmony.
Once again, I can’t give the timepiece itself all the credit – it wasn’t just that the Anillo GMT was in fact particularly cool and looked great on my wrist that drew me in. It was the story and the maker behind it. Josh is also a lawyer (hey, who knew layers make such great watches?) and a dad (now you’re seeing where the paper planes come in). He and his family split their time between their home in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (enter brutalist architecture).
I think you see where this is going – Josh’s attention to detail and deeper meaning behind each of those details blew me away and solidified my love of this timepiece. It was a major risk to combine each of these highly personal elements into a rather atypical watch as a new to market brand, but he did it anyway and that’s the attitude we could use more of in watchmaking.
