About HomageFinder

Back in 2018 I started buying watches on AliExpress, and ran into a problem: I have small wrists, and there was no way to find watches small enough for me. AliExpress still will not let you filter by case diameter — or thickness, or crystal material, or genuine water resistance.

So I built the filter form I wanted, pointed it at 7,213 watches I had catalogued, and decided other people might as well use it too.

Then it turned into something else

The people at watchuseek.com and other watch forums helped me debug it, and taught me something I had not expected: most people were not searching by size at all. They wanted a homage of one specific watch — a Submariner, a Speedmaster, a Nomos Tangente.

So I added a way to suggest which watch a given Chinese watch pays tribute to, reviewed every submission by hand, and built up the homage database — now 605 mappings. That part exists nowhere else, because enthusiasts built it.

I also paid people to read through buyer reviews and summarise the real pros and cons of individual watches, which is why some pages have a proper verdict on them.

Homages, not replicas

A homage borrows a design language but wears its own name on the dial. A replica lies about what it is. This site indexes the first kind and deliberately excludes the second — a few brands that turned out to be selling counterfeits have been removed entirely.

How current is any of this?

The specifications come from crawls of AliExpress listings made in November 2021. Every watch page shows its own crawl date. Case sizes, materials and movements do not change, so the filters are as accurate as they ever were. Prices and stock do change, which is why every listing links through to the live page.

AliExpress added bot protection that broke my crawler, which is why the catalogue has not grown recently. If you spot a watch that should be here, the contact form still reaches me.

Paying for itself

Links to AliExpress, DHgate and Banggood are affiliate links. If you buy through one, the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you, and that covers the hosting. It does not influence what gets listed or how anything is rated — ratings are AliExpress buyers' own, reproduced as they were recorded.

Something missing or broken? Please tell me.