Preowned luxury watches an exploding market
Business better for used than new high-end pieces
NEW YORK — Around two dozen traders sit in an open-layout second floor of a building in suburban Philadelphia. Surrounded by computer monitors, loud conversation and ringing phones, the energy on this trading floor is high and the commodity is blingy.
At the headquarters of Govberg, they’re not dealing in diamonds or gold but preowned luxury watches, of which the company sells about $200 million worth a year.
Some 100 miles northeast, 23-year-old Christian Zeron sits in his parents’ dining room in suburban New Jersey looking at around 30 preowned vintage watches. In a few days, he’ll put them up for sale on his company’s website, theoandharris.com, which sells $2 million worth of watches annually.
Govberg, in the watch business for 35 years, and Theo&harris, founded only three years ago, are part of the thriving preowned luxury watch business. Along with dozens of other companies, they are the core of an industry that has exploded over the past few years, rivaling the new luxury timepiece business in size.
“It’s bigger than people think,” said Reginald Brack, executive director and industry analyst for watches and luxury at NPD Group, which studies $2 trillion in consumer spending across 20 industries.
Brack said it’s difficult to quantify precisely the market for preowned watches because nobody tracks it thoroughly. But some estimates put it at three times the new luxury watch market, itself estimated to be worth up to $10 billion just in the U.S.
“I wouldn’t disagree with that statement,” Brack said. “And it’s only getting bigger.”
The preowned business allows shoppers to get a good deal on modern watches like the Rolex Submariner, while also offering a large selection of vintage pieces like an early 20th-century Cartier Tank.
Danny Govberg, the founder of Govberg’s global watch operation Watchbox, compared the rise of preowned watches to the “quartz revolution” nearly five decades ago.
The introduction of battery-operated quartz movements in wristwatches took a big bite out of the market share from major automatic or mechanical watch brands such as Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, Jaeger-lecoultre, and Audemars Piguet. Those brands, which have since recovered, are now the bread and butter of today’s preowned watch traders.
“Preowned watches are coming out of drawers so fast and furious now that I’ve never seen anything like it,” Govberg said in an interview in the company’s headquarters in Bala Cynwyd, just outside Philadelphia. “It’s a real disruption coming to our industry.”
Luxury brands have taken note. In June, Richemont, the owner of such brands as Cartier and IWC, bought Watchfinder, a British online platform for trading preowned watches.