Do People Still Wear Watches?

Yes — and it isn’t close. If you are asking because you are about to spend real money on a watch for someone who owns a phone, here is the reassurance you came for: in 2025 the Swiss watch industry alone exported 14.6 million watches worth 24.4 billion francs, and the United States was its largest single destination market at 17% of exports. That is one country’s premium watch industry in one year, and it excludes every Seiko, Citizen, Casio, Timex and Bulova sold worldwide — which is to say, it excludes almost everything on this site.

What has genuinely changed is why people wear them. The watch stopped being the way you find out the time some years ago. It stayed because it is the one piece of jewelry most men wear, because it is the only way to check the time without picking up a phone and losing ten minutes, and because a mechanical watch is a small, kept object in a world of disposable ones. None of those reasons is threatened by a phone.

What the numbers actually show

The honest reading of the Swiss export figures is a market that is large and slightly shrinking rather than collapsing: exports fell 1.7% in value in 2025 against 2024, the second consecutive annual decline, with unit volumes down 4.8%. That is a mature industry under trade and currency pressure — not an industry being abandoned. For comparison, the number of watches leaving Switzerland in a single year is still larger than the population of most countries buying them.

It is also worth being precise about what the figures do and don’t cover. They measure Swiss exports, which skew premium. They do not measure the Japanese brands that dominate the $50–$400 gift band, they do not measure second-hand sales, and they do not measure how often the watches already in drawers get worn. So treat 14.6 million as a floor on the real answer, not a ceiling.

Who still wears one — and who doesn’t

• People with a dress code. Anyone who wears a suit, a uniform, or presents in front of a room tends to wear a watch, because it is the accepted piece of visible jewelry in almost every professional setting.
• People who can’t use a phone at work.Nurses, surgeons, teachers, pilots, chefs, tradespeople. Phones are impractical, unhygienic or banned; a watch isn’t. See watch gifts for a nurse for the clearest example.
• People who like mechanical things. The entire enthusiast market runs on this, and it is why affordable automatics keep selling.
• Younger buyers, increasingly.The interesting pattern in the gift-buying queries we track is how many are for 18th and 21st birthdays — a first watch remains a rite-of-passage gift.
• Who doesn’t:people who work at a desk alone, dislike anything on their wrists, or already wear a fitness tracker they refuse to take off. That last group is the real one to worry about — see watch vs smartwatch as a gift.

What this means if you’re buying one as a gift

The risk with a gift watch was never that watches are obsolete. It is that this watch is wrong for thisperson — wrong size, wrong metal, wrong level of fuss. That is a solvable problem, and it is worth about ten minutes:

1. Check whether they currently wear anything on their wrist, and what metal their other jewelry is.
2. Get the case size roughly right — the most common miss. Our watch size guide has the wrist-to-case table.
3. Match the maintenance to the person. Solar and quartz need nothing; automatics need to be worn.

If they already wear a smartwatch every day, that is genuine information, and it doesn’t automatically rule out a traditional watch — plenty of people wear a tracker on weekdays and a real watch out in the evening. But it does mean you should buy something with presence rather than something purely practical, because the practical slot is taken.

The short version

People still wear watches, in the tens of millions per year, for reasons a phone doesn’t touch. Buy the watch. Just buy the right one for them — and if you want the fastest route to that, our five-step guide to choosing a watch as a giftis the whole decision in one page. If you want the safest possible answer for someone whose taste you can’t read, these two are the picks we recommend most often: