Rolex at retail prices

Ri_Nollaig wrote: »

The big thing to consider with Omega, is atleast you will actually be able to get one, easily enough. And no one ever pays their RRP, it will be atleast 10-15% less than that, maybe more if you get a bargain. That really cuts into any money lost if you were than to sell it on again.

or get one used and cut even more of a deal.

Its crazy we live in a world where its possible to buy a submariner, wear it every day for 20+ years and STILL sell it on for atleast what you paid (maybe even for a bit more) for it.

Currently. That's the important part Ri. Yes if you bought one in 2001, when they were cheaper at retail you'd get all your money back today, if not more. If you'd bought one in 1980, you wouldn't have in 2000. If you buy one today(where they've since gone up quite a bit in RRP, never mind the grey market) there is no guarantee that in 2041 the same will hold. It almost certainly won't.

You don't even have to go back that far to see this. Take this very forum that kicked off in 2009. Watch collecting was already and long a thing on the interwebs. Hodinkee which was actually late to the party had started in 08, Watchuseek had been around since 05, others had been around for a lot longer back into the 90's. Anyway if we go back to here in 09 it's a few pages before Rolex is mentioned and it's in this thread "Buying a Rolex". To save clicking here are some highlights:


I'm sort of interested in buying a Rolex, there's some sites where you can buy a discounted one

there are very good places like timezone or watchuseek where you can get a bargain


You should join up with www.rolexforums.com

There is a buy/sell section where very respected members of the forum sell watches for great prices with lots of availability.

Now to read dealers and other vested industry interests you'd be forgiven for believing that steel sports Rolex have always gone up in value and were always an "investment". Well they actually state that clearly. The Belfast based Pride and Pinion crowd states that no steel Rolex has gone down in value since the 1970's. Yeah. Utter bollocks, but they've copied and pasted that utter bollocks from others(like most of their copy). And yet a decade ago bargains were to be had and availability was not even an issue. A decade before that talk on the forums would be along the lines of IWC, Rolex or TAG, which would you buy? Followed by positives and negatives of each. These days TAG is a dirty word and IWC seem to have fallen off a cliff in popularity and exposure. Look at Hodinkee's first talking watches with the guitarist Mayer guy. The takeaways from that were his Rolex Milsub and his IWC Big Pilot. The latter was a big deal for a few years. Today? Barely gets a mention and now the same Mayer is hoovering up Rolex jewellery items that look like Liberace's codpiece. Well, that's what his dealer told him to "invest" in.

TL;DR? If you want to buy a [insert brand here] as a lifetime watch, do your research, try and find someone who has one so you can try it on for size, buy secondhand if you can. If it's a currently "hot" and overpriced model Rolex, buy it, because unless you're into flipping watches every few months what it costs now will matter little enough in decades to come. Don't buy for investment. The time for that in any market is when the general public don't see the items as investments. It's nearly always too late by the time they do. As far as making big returns anyway. This goes double if there's the hint of hype and need to jump now before it's too late.

Deleted User wrote: »

They do though. If say a Porsche dealer was allocated a single limited edition model, do you think they would sell it to a whoever was first in the door or someone who has been a regular customer over the years?
Porsche themselves have mulled leasing limited edition cars to avoid them being flipped or dealers cashing in.

Yep the high end car crowd have been at this for years. Ferrari pretty much started this back in the day. Enzo would only sell his road cars to those he deemed "worthy"(and who would advertise the brand for him), which of course increased the cache no end. Though when he was first trying to get a foothold in the US that went out the window and it was whoever had the cash. You can have the same going on with women's handbags that cost eleventy million pounds. Standard operating marketing procedure to push the luxury, you're really special stuff among your customer base. It works on those who end up with the item and trickles down to those who aspire to own said item. Constrain supply and voila! Rolex have played it extremely well over the last few years. First they upped the RRP's, then constrained supply and turned a mid tier watch brand that had near zero penetration outside of Britain and her commonwealth into the worldwide luxury brand behemoth it is today, and did it with steel watches. They had some cache, though somewhat dubious a one back in the day, but it was gold or two tone bling to wideboys, potentates and suburban accountants.

Now you hear that Audemars Piguet with their Royal Oak and later Patek with their near clone brought "luxury" to the steel watch market, but in reality AP took most of the 1970's to sell off their first thousand or so Royal Oaks and Patek's sales were still mostly gold dress watches. Royal Oaks and Nautilus' are very high profile over the last few years, but in the 70's 80's and 90's and well into the 00's they were way off the radar. You just didn't see them. However Rolex were plugging away throughout. Yeah the two tones and bling were the big sellers but the steel subs were a consistent seller and they leveraged that into the steel costs more and is luxury today. The Rolex in steel is the luxury watch for the vast majority of people.

While I struggle to think of another Swiss big watch brand that innovated less*, Rolex are without any shadow of a doubt the finest marketing machine of knowing what their customer base wants and have been since they were founded. They're one of the finest marketing outfit of any brand full stop. That is not easy to be and to be that good for that length of time.




*even here they have convinced the majority of their customer base, potential and actual, from newbs to many collectors that they essentially invented the modern wristwatch. Better yet they pulled that incredible trick off without saying a word on the matter themselves. They let others do the talking. They haven't pushed the innovation angle since the 1930's pretty much. They were nobodies in the chronometer trials, yet have "Superlative Chronometer"(which is a trademark) on the dial and again are seen as the chronometer brand.

Yep you can tell the date alright N, the boxes weren't as fancy as then before box opening vids on youtube. Though the 1950's gave the best box in my humble...

When we start to see ads for Rolex financing that'll be another bad sign.