Mr Kris Smith remembers his first encounter with a luxury watch vividly. As he recalls, the local “bad people” of the Manchester area he grew up in would walk around with the world’s most beautiful watches: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Cartier. It was questionable how these individuals came to be in possession of such valuable timepieces, but it didn’t sway Smith’s mind that one day, he would work hard to buy himself one of his own.

“I grew up in Manchester and we never had any money,” he says. “We lived in a housing estate and while we didn’t have much, we didn’t need much, either. But I’ll always remember, as a kid, I would see these local ‘bad’ people in the area walking around with these beautiful watches on their wrists. They had never worked a day in their life, but they somehow had these incredible watches. One day, one of them let me try on this flashy rose-gold Rolex Daytona and it was there and then that I fell in love with watches.

“I made a promise to myself that I would one day buy a watch like that for myself. I had come from a background where doing things for myself was vitally important and I didn’t want anyone to buy it for me. I didn’t want it to be a gift. I wanted to work for it.

“I started playing rugby league professionally and, while a watch of that stature wasn’t quite on the list of immediate necessities, I waited and I waited and I waited. On my 30th birthday, I walked into the Rolex boutique in Sydney and I bought my first watch: a two-tone Rolex Datejust.

“Now, the good story about the Datejust… My parents came to visit me in Australia a few weeks later. When they arrived, the whole time I could see my dad was fixated on my watch. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, so I let him try it on and wear it for the time that he was visiting. I would often just catch him staring at this watch. Come Christmas time, I boxed it up and gifted it to him on Christmas Day. I knew he could never afford to buy a watch like this and, even if he could, he wouldn’t. He nearly fell off his chair when he opened it.

“That will be my favourite watch of all time just because of the sentimental value. And I know one day, God forbid it’s not for a long time, but I know it’ll come back to me. And I know, from that day on, I’ll never wear another watch.”

These days, Smith enjoys celebrating significant milestones with a new watch – a luxury he’s able to afford, thanks to a successful career in modelling and presenting after his retirement from rugby league.

When he left England to move to Australia with his partner at the time, Ms Dannii Minogue, more than 10 years ago, he bought himself a yellow gold Cartier Santos 100 to mark the ending of his sporting career (and the beginning of his new life in Melbourne). For his 40th birthday, he bought himself a yellow-gold blue-dial Submariner, a watch that he will “never sell”. Then, there was the time he gifted his fiancée a Rolex Datejust for her 30th birthday.

“To buy something for yourself is great, but to gift someone something like a watch that has meaning is truly special,” he says. “It’s pretty difficult to explain the feeling of buying a new watch to someone who hasn’t done so themselves. It’s difficult to explain the instant addiction it forces upon you, whether you like it or not. With any watch purchase I’ve made, I find myself constantly obsessing over it. For weeks, months, even years. Always looking at it. You begin your watch journey with that very first purchase and I don’t think it’ll even stop.”