Issue 192: The Best Ways To Spend £5,000 On A Watch
43 New, Pre-Owned and Vintage picks. Plus my thoughts on Morgan Stanley's league table and Richard Mille's soccer timer
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is today dispensing helpful consumer advice, in the face of at least two recent industry reports and many years worth of overwhelming anecdotal data showing this to be a severely struggling market segment. Oh. Well nevertheless, I think it might well be the case that there are still people out there with five thousand pounds (or dollars, or euros, it’s close enough) to spend on a watch and a bad case of decision paralysis. For you, I am here to help. For everyone else (as the data clearly shows us the only watches that are selling are the extraordinarily expensive ones) if you are simply weighing up whether to buy the AP Neo Frame, a Daytona Le Mans in yellow gold or double down on crypto in the hope that you’ll realise enough of a profit to whack down a deposit on an RM 67-02 by April, I am afraid you are on your own. Best of luck.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
The Centre Cannot Hold
First things first: this week saw the release of the annual Morgan Stanley/LuxeConsult watch industry report, narrowly losing out to Pancake Day in the rankings of “most important annual event this week in the Hall household”.
The usual caveats: the numbers are disputed by brands - actually, let’s be honest, they are disputed by brands who come off badly in the report. Jacob & Co actually put out a press release celebrating its status as the fastest-growing brand in the top 50, without once actually confirming that the figures are accurate. It’s have-cake-and-eat-it stuff.
Except the bottom line is that there really isn’t much cake to go round, and what there is is being consumed by four or five greedy greedy customers. Yes, the headline news is that Rolex, AP, Patek and Richard Mille are dominating; Cartier is bucking the group-brand trend, and Omega has slipped significantly (by its standards).
Before I go any further, I’m going to do something I would never expect in traditional media. If you want to read a really good analysis of this year’s report, seek out this week’s SDC Weekly by kingflum and if you want even more, take a look at Pointless Complication by Velociphile. They both come to similar conclusions - it’s hard not to, given the data, which is why I’m not going to spend 2,000 words doing the exact same - but Velociphile builds in some extra context around employment data and brand strategy that means it’s worth reading both.
I will say just a few things about the report and the analyses above.
If you think the market share dominance of the new ‘Big Four’ is crazy, at 51 per cent, their share of the profit pool - a ridiculous 76 per cent - is one of the most jaw-dropping stats in the report. The thought that every other watchmaker in the country is competing for a quarter of the potential reward is wild.
You might be confused to see Breguet continuing to decline even after a bumper year of great press coverage, the big GPHG win and plenty of well-received watches. Well don’t be: nearly all the watches that got everyone salivating are seriously low volume even by Breguet’s standards, so even allowing for the premiumisation1 trend, the brand still needs to sell more ‘core product’. Secondly, I wouldn’t be surprised if a great deal of the anniversary watches are still in the production pipeline - if Breguet is lucky it’ll see a delayed bump in 2026 figures.
This looks like the year we will start to get real about what has been happening at Panerai, if a claimed decline of 31 per cent in volume and turnover is accurate.
I keep seeing some chumps on Instagram with ten times my social clout and beaming enthusiasm banging on about Vacheron Constantin being the most underrated watch brand. It sells nearly a billion francs’ worth of watches a year. Sure, it’s not as loud as AP, but there are music festivals that aren’t as loud as AP. Stop pushing this banal excuse for ‘insight’ into my feed.
The really interesting thing to me now that we all know and understand exactly how much trouble the mid-market luxury brands are in (Omega, Breitling, TAG Heuer, IWC, Panerai and so on) is this: we have all spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what the brands have done wrong (lazy design, aggressive price hikes, corners cut, mixed messaging, take your pick) but what about the demand-side factors at work? By which I mean obviously the above list is more than enough to deter customers from buying, but are there other reasons why the former buyer of £5,000-£10,000 watches isn’t there any more? They can’t all be buying Rolexes and most indie alternatives are priced higher or lower. Is it the rise of pre-owned? Squeezed middle classes in economically flatlining Western nations? Turning away from watches altogether? Love to know your thoughts.
Given the consensus (which has been building for a while and isn’t news to anyone) I actually think this week’s main topic (which I will confess I decided to do because it has been a nightmare week and I needed to be a bit faster than usual) is germane. Velociphile says the bellwether sector of the market is the 5,000-15,000 bracket, so I am shopping at the low end of that, but he also says quite rightly that one of the biggest flaws with the industry’s current trajectory is that it neglects the pipeline of future customers, so I think looking at the low end could be the smart place to look.
Let’s go shopping: how to spend £5,000 on a watch in today’s market
I wanted to get back to basics this week and talk about what it’s really like to be out there with money in your pocket and watches on your mind. For once, it’s nice not to be focussing on the shortcomings of watch media, or the sillier elements of brand strategy.
It’s also - as I mentioned above - vaguely pertinent. We have come to accept that this is a problematic market segment, so what’s it like actually being in the mind of a potential customer?
For the purposes of this exercise, I’m imagining a very specific scenario that gives us what I have long considered “first really proper luxury watch” territory. Maybe I’ve inherited it, maybe it was a bonus, maybe I had a good night at the blackjack table, but I’ve got £5,000 that I hadn’t anticipated. Let’s say I’m not averse to putting some of it in the bank just in case, but that on the other hand, if I find my dream watch at £5,500 I can go the extra ten percent without worry. So I’m searching between £4,000 and £5,500. Let’s see what that gets us.
Scenario A: Buying New
First stop, the big multi-brand stores (because, I don’t know, I’m unimaginative but want to see a range). Can we take a moment to acknowledge how unintuitive it is to browse all brands, by the way, on the likes of Bucherer and WoS? Providing this kind of cross-brand comparison is meant to be your USP guys, but online, it’s all about directing traffic into particular brands. Good luck discovering anything you didn’t already know…
Behind the paywall: my comprehensive expert guide to the only watches even worth considering at retail price, followed by a load of frankly excellent pre-owned and vintage finds, all of which make the new propositions look a bit silly. There really is something for everyone.
