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RECOMMENDED READING: Cashing in on the luxury watch bonanza RECOMMENDED READING: Cashing in on the luxury watch bonanza

RECOMMENDED READING: Cashing in on the luxury watch bonanza

Felix Scholz

If you pay attention to the more business-to-business end of watchland you might have noticed that UK-based mega-retailer Watches of Switzerland (not to be confused with our local Aussie retailers of the same name) recently listed on the London Stock Exchange. They noticed it over at Axios, where this interesting piece on the business of telling time comes from.

Photoshopped image of a watch with a coin as the dial.
Image: axios.com

Lots of it will be anecdotally familiar to people in the trenches of watch collecting, but it’s interesting to see it picked up by capital N News. Our key takeouts?

Yup, Ecommerce is still the next big thing, but we’re not sure what it’s going to look like:

Luxury goods giant Richemont, owner of Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre, is going for broke, investing nearly $3.4 billion in used watch seller Watchfinder and other online vendors last year. They’re not alone.

And the industry is finally engaging with second-hand watches in a serious way, with AP, Breitling and LVMH all planning to address the secondary market, which could be bigger than new.

This, combined with supply issues among certain brands, is why we’re seeing a situation where “used watches sold online in 2018 regularly fetched higher prices than new ones”.

It’s the wild west out there, people. Read the full story at Axios.