How Pre-Owned Watches Make You a More Adventurous Collector

Walk into a boutique with a budget and a shortlist, and there's a very real tendency to go for the sensible choice. You're probably paying full retail, after months of waiting for that call, and there's probably a very real subtext in your mind as to what that watch would fetch if you decided to move it out of your collection one day. So you end up with the reference that everyone else agrees on, perhaps the one with the nice safe black or blue dial, and you'll end up talking yourself out of the more interesting one that you actually spent the most time looking at. 

The secondary market takes a lot of that pressure off. The blow of walking out of the boutique with a brand new watch has already been taken by someone else, and the asking price will generally be what the collectors think the watch is worth rather than what the brand would like it to be worth. If a pre-owned watch doesn't quite click after six months, you can move on, and it'll sting a lot less. 

Discontinued Watches: Slow Sellers You Can Buy Pre-Owned

Brands stop making watches for all sorts of reasons, and a very common one is that they just don't sell enough. The Patek Philippe Neptune is a good case in point. The 5085/1A came out in the late 1990s as a sort of middle ground between the Nautilus and the more dressy Patek pieces. It had a moon phase and power reserve display in addition to the date, was powered by a micro-rotor movement, and came in a 37mm steel case that was just 9.6mm thick. But it never really took off, and Patek discontinued it in 2005. 

Twenty-odd years later, collectors who've gotten bored with chasing the same handful of steel sports watches have started looking for it. Put a like-new example down on the table at a collectors' get-together, and it gets a fair amount of attention, mostly because many may have never seen one in real life. Someone who bought one new in 2003 was backing an unproven model at full Patek pricing. Today, most of that uncertainty has gone, and you know how it wears and roughly what it's worth before you've ever spent a cent. 

Then there are the watches that were never actually in the catalog at all... 

Rare Dial Variants and Custom Watches You Can’t Buy New

Rolex has actually been fitting the Day-Date with dials made from stone and other interesting materials for a long time. The combinations from the '70s and '80s were far from the 'buttoned up' affair you'd find in a boutique case today. A c.1989 Rolex Day-Date 18308 in yellow gold with its very distinctive bark finish, ferrite dial, and Roman numerals is as far as you could possibly get from the slick gold Day-Date that most people imagine. So is a c.1971 Day-Date 1803 with an oxblood Stella dial, one of the glossy lacquered dials that Rolex produced in a run of quite flamboyant colors in that era.

Sometimes the detail that makes a watch interesting is one that the original owner didn't even choose. The Rolex Air-King 14000 with a Domino's Pizza logo on the dial was never sold to the public. Domino's handed them out to franchise owners who hit sales targets, a tradition that reportedly started when founder Tom Monaghan offered a franchisee his own Domino's-branded watch in return for a $20,000 sales week. For years after, many dealers treated the logo as a negative and swapped in a standard dial. Now, a 1997 example with its box and papers sells on the strength of that logo. (You can read more about the Domino’s-branded watches on the EWC blog here.)

Underrated Watch Brands Worth Buying Pre-Owned

That Air-King is listed at $24,900, which in itself says a lot about the secondary market. You could buy one of two perpetual calendars for less than that and still have change left over. One of those is a 2012 Glashütte Original Senator Perpetual Calendar in steel, which came back from a full service in Glashütte this year. The other is a 2006 Ulysse Nardin Marine Acqua Perpetual, a rather chunky 43mm steel perpetual calendar on a bracelet, which is very much a sports watch rather than a dress watch. 

Neither brand is really all that present at the average watch meetup. Glashütte Original tends to be in the shadow of A. Lange & Söhne just down the road, and Ulysse Nardin is far better known for the Freak than for anything on the calendar side. If you're buying new, you're paying full price for a brand whose resale curve most people would rather not contemplate. With pre-owned, you're getting a watch with the depreciation already behind it, and what's left is a properly complex watch from a brand with genuine watchmaking credentials at a price point that is absolutely worth considering. 

Buying the Seller: Vetting Service History and Pricing

With an unusual watch, it’s even more important to know who has examined it before you have. A discontinued or off-catalog piece poses questions that a core collection model simply doesn't. Was the dial the one it left the factory with? How easy will it be to source parts in the future? With so many Domino's dials having been swapped over the years, the question of originality is far from paranoia. 

Collector Michael Lam's two main watches, a Vacheron Constantin Historiques American 1921 and a Breguet Tradition 7097, both came to him pre-owned, and the gap between boutique and secondary market pricing is the main reason he'd never have bought either one new. Who he was buying from mattered just as much as the price, though. "I know it's cliché in the watch world, but you should definitely buy the seller first before buying the watch," Lam said. "This made me comfortable taking a chance on the timepieces themselves, from reputable sellers." He still did his own homework on condition and made sure both came with their box and papers. "It worked out beautifully, as I rotate through them daily," he said. 

It's a fair test to put to any dealer. At European Watch Company, every watch is inspected by the watchmakers prior to being listed, and all watches come with a one-year limited warranty. There's a two-day return window, too, which is useful if a watch that looked fantastic in the pictures doesn't actually work out on your wrist. Service history is, of course, a bigger factor with a pre-owned watch, as you're much more comfortable with a watch that's just come back from the manufacturer than one where you have no idea when the movement was last serviced. 

Even with all of that, not every experiment works out. Lam spends a lot of time scrolling through listings online. "I do catch the odd brand I have never heard of or a piece I obsess over," he said. One of those was a Glashütte Original PanoMaticLunar with a rose opaline dial. "I enjoyed the piece briefly but never really connected with it. I ended up selling the piece shortly after," Lam said. He hasn't been tempted by another Glashütte Original since, though he "can appreciate them from afar." 

Pre-owned is ideal for precisely this kind of personal taste experiment, since someone else has already taken the plunge and paid the price for the watch when it was purchased new. A watch that the market completely overlooked once may well remain overlooked, and if you do eventually decide to sell, you could be waiting a long time for the right buyer to turn up. The benefit, of course, is that the price you paid already takes that into account. It's just a waiting game. 

Somebody Has to Buy Them New First: Why Pre-Owned Makes You Bolder

That doesn't mean you should walk past the boutique altogether. There are plenty of watches on the market today that are worth buying new, and the second-hand market only exists because someone has. If, however, your shortlist has now become essentially just like everyone else's, then pre-owned is a far less painful way to experiment, and find out exactly what you actually like.