[ad_1]
NEW YORK – Twenty merchants are sitting on the second floor of a suburban building in Philadelphia. Surrounded by computer screens, noisy conversations and ring tones, the energy in this trading room is high and the merchandise is blingy.
At Govberg's headquarters, there are no diamonds or gold, but second-hand luxury watches, whose company sells about $ 200 million a year.
Christian Zeron, 23, sits in his parents' dining room in the suburbs of New Jersey, about 160 kilometers northeast, watches about 30 vintage second-hand watches. In a few days, he will put them up for sale on his company's website, theoandharris.com, which sells $ 2 million worth of watches each year.
Govberg, in the watch industry for 35 years, and Theo & Harris, founded just three years ago, are part of the flourishing luxury watch business. With dozens of other companies, they constitute the core of an industry that has exploded in recent years, rivaling the size of the new luxury timekeeping business.
"It's more important than people think," said Reginald Brack, executive director and analyst of the watch and luxury industry at NPD Group, which studies $ 2 trillion in consumer spending in 20 countries. industries.
Brack said it was difficult to accurately quantify the used watch market because no one is following it closely. But some estimates place it at three times the market for new luxury watches, estimated at $ 10 billion in the United States alone.
"I would not disagree with this statement," said Brack. "And he's just getting fatter."
Even though watches have disappeared from the wrists due to the proliferation of cell phones, luxury watches remain a popular status symbol. In fact, sales have increased slightly over the past two years.
The second-hand trade activity allows buyers to do business on modern timepieces like Rolex Submariner, while offering a wide selection of vintage pieces such as a Cartier tank from the early 20th century.
Danny Govberg, founder of Govberg's global surveillance operation, WatchBox, compared the rise of second-hand watches to the "quartz revolution" nearly five decades ago.
The introduction of battery-operated quartz movements in wristwatches has significantly reduced the market share of major brands of automatic or mechanical watches such as Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Audemars Piguet. These brands, which have since recovered, are now the daily bread of merchants in second-hand watches.
"Used watches come out of drawers so quickly and furiously that I've never seen anything like it," Govberg said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Bala Cynwyd, just in the morning. outside Philadelphia. "It's a real disruption for our industry."
Luxury brands have taken note. In June, Richemont, owner of brands such as Cartier and IWC, bought Watchfinder, a British online trading platform for second-hand watches.
"The opportunities market has taken business in the new market, there is no doubt," said Steven Kaiser, formerly head of the watch industry and founder of Kaiser Time, a luxury industry consulting company based At New York.
Govberg entered the second-hand watch industry in 1983, when he introduced watches into his family's jewelry store located in Jeweler's Row, on Sansom Street in Philadelphia.
"People did not collect vintage timepieces at the time," he said, recalling that he would be traveling to Europe to buy Rolex and Patek Philippes from time to time at the shows. # 39; watchmaking. "Small shows you would go to, almost like trading card shows. Like watch exchange programs.
At the turn of the millennium, new platforms such as eBay have led Govberg to adopt its own online strategy. In the end, he founded WatchBox, a digital platform and app that includes video reviews and a commercial market for valuable timepieces. The company recently launched a second season of "The Classroom," a series on YouTube that aims to educate watch enthusiasts about the intricacies of owning a watch worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Zeron, of Theo & Harris, also uses the video to present his thoughts on the sector. He regularly receives hundreds of thousands of views for his four weekly posts on YouTube.
"Social media is where he took off," he said, sitting in his parents' living room with Anna Griffin, who was his first employee and student at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. . "We do not have a retail store, there was no real pedestrian traffic. It was all a social buzz. "
The young entrepreneur, who founded the company with $ 10,000 in birthday money when he was a sophomore, has a larger-than-life personality on social media, with a flawless approach to roasting. iconic brands such as Breitling. Some of his viewers said that he needed to fire caffeine or sugar.
Internet has democratized knowledge of watchmaking, along with other areas of expertise such as aviation.
A watch enthusiast can spend hours on web forums to debate the differences between the different versions of a $ 4,500 Tudor Black Bay ("I love the domed crystal, but I'd be interested to see it 1 mm thicker, "says a member of RolexForums.com of the latest version of" Fifty-eight. ")
The explosive growth of second-hand watch sales, however, has deeper roots than social media. Owning a mechanical device that can hold three hundred small pieces is an emotional and intellectual attraction.
"Nothing that's consumed is any more interesting," said Zeron, wearing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date in 18-carat gold.
Take the ubiquitous iPhone – easily replaceable, Zeron notes.
"If your vintage Omega breaks, that's it. It's over. You'll never get another one, "he said. "You will remember the drinks, the dates and the arguments you had. You'll be sad to have lost it.
Then come the volume and variety of offers, drawers constantly flowing in the drawers.
"If you go to an IWC store, you can choose between 50, 60, 70 and 80 watches," said Govberg. "But in the space reserved for IWC, you can choose from 900 watches."
But the bottom line is that a used luxury watch in very good condition usually costs a third of the price of a new one.
"For someone from a collector, to try several pieces, it's a natural choice," said Paul Bragan, watch collector and senior partner of market research company Wakefield. Research, based in Arlington, Virginia.
Bragan spent hours interviewing Zeron online before making the big jump with his first vintage watch purchase: a 1978 Rolex Datejust, which the founder of Theo & Harris personally delivered during a trip to Washington, DC DC. It was the beginning of a friendship and many other purchases for Bragan.
"There is an exchange value proposition with second-hand watches much like the auto industry," said Brack of NPD.
Watch frames often say that their business is like the auto industry, but better.
"In the automotive sector, you have about 15 years of driving experience," said Govberg. "The watches are supposed to last 100 years."
___
Follow Amir Bibawy on Twitter @AmirBibawy
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
[ad_2]
Source link
