Ben’s Watch Club is one of YouTube’s most trusted voices in affordable watches — a channel built, in its own words, on “preventing buyer’s remorse”. Founded in 2019 by UK-based creator Ben Arthur, who began reviewing watches every evening after work, it has grown into a full media operation reaching over a million viewers and readers each month, spanning the main YouTube channel, the benswatchclub.com review site with its hand-picked team of writers, a weekly “In The Loupe” newsletter and unboxing channel, and even a Spanish-language edition.
The channel made its name with forensic, often very funny exposés of heavily-marketed fashion watch brands. Ben’s investigations into MVMT, Daniel Wellington, Vincero, Filippo Loreti and others — famously including the discovery of an unbranded sub-£20 watch identical to a full-priced Daniel Wellington — reshaped how a generation of beginners thinks about “affordable luxury”, and earned him a reputation in the enthusiast community as a genuine consumer advocate. Fellow collectors credit the channel with steering thousands away from overpriced drop-shipped watches and towards genuine value brands like Seiko, Casio, Citizen, Orient and Timex.
Alongside the takedowns sit hundreds of hands-on reviews, brand tier lists, buying guides and documentary-style deep dives, with Ben getting hands-on with more than 200 watches a year across his channels. Editorial independence is central to the brand: coverage is a mix of positive, negative and neutral, and creative control is never sold to watch brands — a rarity in the review space, and the reason his verdicts carry such weight.
Three of the channel’s most viewed videos
Watch This BEFORE You Buy A Vincero Watch…
Perhaps the definitive Ben’s Watch Club video and one of the channel’s biggest hits. Ben puts the relentlessly Instagram-advertised Vincero up against a Pagani Design chronograph costing a fraction of the price, demonstrating just how little the “affordable luxury” marketing machine actually delivers for your money. It’s the video that cemented the channel’s reputation as the fashion-watch industry’s least favourite watchdog — and it still steers buyers away from marked-up drop-shipped watches years later.
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AFFORDABLE WATCH BRAND TIER LIST (My Sub-$200 Rankings)
An endlessly shareable format meets genuine expertise: Ben ranks the big names of the budget watch world — Casio, Citizen, Timex, Orient, Fossil, MVMT, Vincero and more — into tiers based on the value they actually offer under roughly $200. Opinionated enough to spark thousands of comments (Citizen fans were famously unimpressed with their placing), it remains one of the most useful starting points on YouTube for anyone buying their first proper watch.
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10 Best Watches In Ben’s Watch Club History! (Awesome Value)
The greatest-hits reel: Ben rounds up the ten best affordable watches he’s ever featured on the channel, distilling years of hands-on reviews into a single best-value shortlist. For newcomers to the channel — or to watches generally — it’s the fastest possible route to a purchase you won’t regret, which is precisely the channel’s founding mission.
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