Watches and Wonders 2024: The Let-Them-Eat-Cake Edition

Main image source: fr.wikipedia.org

Note: If you’d like to hear an audio version of this commentary as well as an associated round-table discussion with my colleagues Rob and Alon, please follow this link to navigate to The Real Time Show.

I’m sure all of us, despite struggling to recall what we had for dinner yesterday, have a head full of random factoids we’ve picked up over our lifetimes, some dating back decades.

I remember being about 12 years old when I read a book on ancient Egypt, at which point I found out that during the mummification process, Egyptians used to carefully conserve a person’s heart, but discarded their brain with the help of a hook inserted up the deceased’s nasal passages. 

The thinking, as I understood it, was that a person’s soul was contained in their heart, while their brain didn’t ultimately matter all that much. It’s a romantic, if slightly gory, image, and I couldn’t help but think of this emphasis on the heart over the brain when the waves of Watches and Wonders 2024 new releases started to wash over my news feeds.

The comparison does indeed apply itself very well to watches. 

Watches that appeal to the “heart” are those that possess everything we love about watchmaking: superior finishing, unbelievably intricate mechanisms and the finest of precious and exotic materials. They exist not so much to tell time, but rather to be beautiful expressions of human ingenuity, that just so happen to tell time.

Watches that appeal to the brain are those that we use to justify the existence of mechanical watches in a world where time is everywhere. These are the Sinns and Seikos that we buy because we tell ourselves that if an electromagnetic pulse ever hit our city, we’d still be able to tell the time, even at night, and even after fighting off armed looters, because of their hardened cases, ample lume, and anti-magnetic hairsprings, all offered at a price that won’t require sacrificing on canned goods

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that in a balanced and healthy market, both should coexist, but Watches & Wonders 2024 is, to me, the most glaring example that, just like in ancient Egypt, the brain of the watch industry is being completely discarded.

As I scroll through my Watchicity feed, right now as I write this, at 2:52 pm on Tuesday April 9th, I see, from the top of the screen down: the Grand Seiko Hi-Beat SLGH021 “Genbi Valley”, two Roger Dubuis Excaliburs, the Hublot MP-11 Water Blue Sapphire, the Parmigiani Fleurier Toric Collection.

And so on and so forth, without a pause.

I have to scroll for quite some time, over pages of Pateks and Langes, to finally reach one watch, the new Tudor Black Bay GMT 58, that one could call “approachable”.

On one hand, it’s fantastic that all these “heart” watches exist in the first place, and that human ingenuity can come up with so many beautiful things all at once.

On the other hand, the fact that there seem to be more and more of them, or at the very least, that these are the watches apparently most worthy of attention at the expense of less extravagant models, is, to me, a problem.

Here’s an eye-opening statistic: according to a joint report written by Morgan Stanley and Luxe Consult, watches with a retail price tag exceeding CHF 25,000 ($27,000) accounted for 69 per cent of growth in the Swiss watch sector in 2023.

Let me rephrase that: watches that approach the cost of a new car account for more than two thirds - two thirds - of the growth of Swiss watch exports last year.

That is insane. 

I sometimes wonder just how much of a broken record I sound like on these Audicles, because the same themes keep popping up over and over, and I’m back again to say that while I understand how and why the luxury watch industry is going in this direction, my hypothesis is that this is detrimental to the long-term health of the business.

I hate to use myself as the only data point to make my case, but I’m very lucky to be in a very high income bracket in my country of France. My wife works as well, and though we love our three dogs as if they were our children, we have no children, and hopefully decades of earning power still left in us.

If anyone should appear to be the target consumers for Watches and Wonders in any year, it’s us.

And yet…

We did recently buy a house. It’s nothing extravagant, and I believe it probably traded hands originally for 100 francs and a wheel of cheese. We bought it from someone who got it for free, finalizing their inheritance the day before the sale to us, and unfortunately they didn’t accept cheese as payment, only currency, and a lot more than 100 francs. This, combined with the other costs of merely existing in 2024, mean that my watch budget is not nearly enough to even sniff at almost any of the models I’ve seen so far, let alone years into the future if this trend continues.

Even the new Zenith Defy Divers, watches that could be classified as “tool watches”, are priced well into the five figures! 

Sure, some of the Tudors are approachable, but doesn’t it feel like you’re being offered more or less the same thing by them every year, the bones Rolex throws at you while it makes watches like the totally-not-tailor-made-for-money-launderers solid gold Deepsea?

Perhaps some people out there will hear this and offer the advice I come across so often when the upper classes talk about the misfortunes of those in lower income brackets:

“Bro, why you mad bro, why do you care and why don’t you just stop being poor?”.

I’m not being facetious, this is the discourse, and I know this because my first Audicle, on the Tiffany-signed Patek Nautilus, started its life as a Reddit post, and this was a take that came up almost immediately.

The problem as I see it is that data tells me that I’m very much not poor, I just don’t have the kind of fuck you and your great-great-great-grandkids money that’s increasingly required to get really into watches. 

I don’t lose any sleep over this, and clearly I will never be able to afford everything my heart desires, that’s just life.

However, it is disappointing to have the watch industry as a whole basically also telling me to stop being poor, because it makes for a less varied and diverse experience, and over time I do find myself caring less and less about what the new releases are.

There is a well-known trope in watch circles that 2,000-5,000 euros is the point at which you start being able to consider “nice” watches. That’s already a considerable sum, life-changing money for a big chunk of the world, but let’s assume that’s the case. That is a very fun category to consider because big brands who want to play in this sandbox have to be quite clever and creative in how they work in their bells-and-whistles (as opposed to when money is no object) but honestly, how well was that bracket served at Watches and Wonders 2024?

The trouble is that, increasingly, this sandbox is becoming empty.

Consider that of the 54 brands exhibiting at the show, I have trouble identifying many that offer anything mechanical in that price range!

Perhaps it’s the case that the people buying all these “heart” watches have infinite amounts of cash to spend.

But what if they don’t?

Or, what if they do?

Wouldn’t it still behoove the luxury watch industry to encourage even more people to come into the fold, so they can make even more money in the future as these new entrants become more seasoned collectors?

Wasn’t the Tissot PRX enough of a convincing argument that there is serious cash to be made in a volume play aimed squarely at everyone who just wants to own something well-made at an attainable price?

Maybe the industry still doesn’t care, thinking I’m just a poor guy with a mortgage who doesn’t matter.

Perhaps, but again, from a long-term perspective, if my personal experience is any indication of a broader trend, I advise against this type of thinking. 

Years of being faced with such price escalations, only accelerated by the pandemic, have led me not only to become very comfortable with owning fewer watches (a topic we’ve also covered in depth), but also to be a ruthless bottom-feeder when it comes to actually purchasing watches.

I do not buy from ADs or boutiques, and in fact when I buy a watch, part of the game is using my decade and a half’s worth of knowledge to find those models on the grey or used markets that give me the most bang for my buck, or just simply the best price on a recently released model.

Crucially, when someone comes to ask me about a big watch purchase (which last happened just a few weeks ago when a colleague was looking for a gift for her husband), I steer them to Chrono24 or Jomashop and offer to review any listing they think happens to be the most advantageous to them over the boutique price.

I can’t be the only one doing this.

How long before this snowballs well beyond just “the data point of me” and becomes a much more serious problem for the luxury watch industry?

Can you imagine that, a whole segment of the watch buying market that has been conditioned to actively disengage from the industry’s primary retail channels?

It’s such a shame, because it’s my opinion that watch brands sit in a particularly advantageous position on which to build some very tangible goodwill, from the bottom up, from a larger segment of consumers than they are currently serving.

In a world where increasing numbers of consumers talk about the “enshitification” of everything, the watch industry is one of the holdouts, because even a “cheap” mechanical watch made today will likely outlast its owner if cared for properly.

Maybe I’m naive here, but if the industry cares so much about sustainability, could it not present itself as the last bastion of quality goods, rather than emphasizing somewhat gimmicky initiatives? To me, the watches themselves are the most sustainable aspect of the industry, and what if its major brands were the ones to start the snowball effect in consumers, who, when first faced with the robustness of a mechanical watch, also start to look for quality in all the other categories in which they had previously settled for disposable options?

It sounds like a pipe dream, but then again, is it? How many of you out there fell into watches and then started looking at all of your other possessions differently?

The fact is, reliable, well-made, reasonably priced watches are exciting, just not in the same manner as a triple-tourbillon, and I’ll even go so far as to say that the former promises much more in terms of potential escapism and adventure than the latter.

And yet…

Just like in the real world, the watch-world’s fortunes appear to be decided by an ever more concentrated pool of people with an ever-expanding pile of money.

I’ll close this out repeating myself again, calling back to a recent Audicle I discussed with Alon and Rob, which leaned heavily on the approaches of industry legend Jean-Claude Biver.

In the 1980’s, after the decimation of the watch industry by the Quartz Crisis, Biver essentially saved it with one astute insight: watches, which had previously been mostly used as essential tools to keep track of the time, could instead be seen not as objects of utility, but rather objects of desire.

Now, we talk not so much about the “watch industry”, but rather, the “luxury watch” industry, and today, four decades later, that focus on luxury seems to remain the underpinning philosophy. If Watches and Wonders is any indication, the luxury watch industry is similarly reaching its endpoint of concentrated decadence, targeted at a concentrated elite, the mirror-image trajectory of late-stage capitalism and its associated enshitification of everything.

Here’s my suggestion:

Can we try swinging back the other way?

I love hearing about watches like IWC’s Eternal Calendar and its incredible such objects exist, but when everything is priced like it, how can anyone be hopeful about Gen-Z and beyond getting as hooked as we are?

Can the industry please go back to presenting watches not just as objects of desire that belong on the wrists of the very few, but rather useful items that can make your day just a little bit easier, brighter, and, yes, more exciting?

How luxury brands can alter course in that direction is a topic for another Audicle or two, and perhaps what we’re seeing now is just the tail-end of the exuberance that has built up over the last four years, but I do hope that we reach an inflection point soon, because, like chocolate and Marvel superhero movies, even gold and diamonds get boring when that’s all you have in front of you.