Our Research: what 586 luxury watch owners told us about the watches on their wrists.

In our research with luxury watch owners — a study unlike anything else conducted in this category — we set out to answer a simple question: what do buyers actually know about the watches on their wrists?

The findings confirmed our suspicions in some places. They surprised us in others. A few of the patterns will be uncomfortable for the industry. None of them, we think, will be surprising to the readers of this guide who have lived through the experience themselves.

Nearly half of luxury watch owners we surveyed were surprised to learn that many luxury watches — including references from highly regarded brands — consistently trade thirty to fifty percent below retail on the secondary market. Some had suspected; few knew the magnitude. A meaningful share had purchased from authorized dealers in those very categories.

Half of respondents did not know that certain luxury watch references have, over rolling five- and ten-year periods, outperformed the S&P 500. Among those who do know, only a fraction said the knowledge had influenced their purchase decisions. The rest treated it as trivia — useful at a dinner party, not actionable at point of sale.

These are not edge cases. These are the buyers whose watches have, or haven't, behaved the way they hoped. The information that would have changed their behavior was simply not part of the conversation when they bought.

Among buyers who purchased from authorized dealers, only nineteen percent said the dealer discussed secondary market value or resale performance in any meaningful detail at the time of purchase. Roughly half said it didn't come up at all. The remainder said it was mentioned briefly, but not centrally.

This is not an indictment of any individual salesperson. It is a description of the industry's structural incentives. An AD who walks a buyer through secondary market data — including the references that don't appreciate, the configurations that depreciate fastest, and the channels that price more aggressively — is not doing their job, by the lights of their employer. They're doing the buyer's job. There is, in their world, no reward for that.

There is, in our world, no other job.

One in three respondents reported regretting a luxury watch purchase. The regret split roughly evenly between two causes: the buyer stopped loving the watch, and the watch lost more value than they expected. About one in five regretted a watch specifically because of value loss.

The open ended responses on this question were striking. We heard repeatedly:

None of these are obscure points. All of them are the kind of thing a competent advisor on the buyer's side would have raised before the purchase, not after.

Before we describe the framework, it's important to determine which version of the framework applies to you.

Every luxury watch purchase answers one of three questions. Most buyers haven't been asked which one is theirs. The question deserves more attention than it usually receives, because the answer changes almost everything that follows.

The Love buyer wants the watch itself. The craft. The mechanism. The way it sits on the wrist. The moment of selecting it. The years of wearing it. You're not indifferent to value, but value is not the question you're answering when you buy.

The Love buyer is well served by parts of the existing industry — the boutique experience, the unboxing, the personal connection with a sales associate who shares your enthusiasm. What the Love buyer is often poorly served by is the avoidable downside: the configuration you didn't realize would underperform, the documentation you didn't know to insist on, the service economics you hadn't anticipated.

The framework, applied to a Love buyer, is mostly about protecting you from regret. It is not about turning your purchase into an investment. It is about ensuring the watch you love is also the watch you don't, five years from now, wish you'd bought differently.