FEATURE: The Era of the Affordable Tourbillon is OVER!

Welcome dear readers and, well... a bit of a last minute change to the scheduled programming today. By rights you should be reading about a very old Heuer 2000 Series I spotted on eBay the other day, but that's going to have to wait... because today we have something far more interesting to talk about.

As you probably know by now, every six months I trawl the UK TAG Heuer website and produce a price list which you can access HERE or by clicking on the 'Price Lists' tab at the top of the page. While it's mildly interesting to keep track of the prices, the real purpose of these 'price lists' is to provide a snapshot of what's available at any given time to future historians. I mean if someone had been doing this since 1986 my life would have been one whole hell of a lot easier these last eight years, I can tell you!

But I digress...

So last weekend I spent a good few hours trawling the TH website and (since I had accidentally deleted my Word document!) typing the whole thing up again. But no sooner had I finished than I noticed the prices on the website had changed. Aaaaaaaaaargh! How frustrating. Still, no point in doing half the job, so I spent a few more hours collecting and correcting all the prices, don't ever say I don't bust my balls for you guys! 😂

Now obviously nobody likes price rises, but over the last eight or nine years I've learned not to take it personally. It is what it is. Watches are not essential items, nobody needs more than one (really) and to be honest I've only bought about four pieces brand new at full retail anyway.

Besides, generally speaking TAG Heuer's price rises usually manifest as £50 on this, £100 on that, maybe as much as £250 on something that costs four or five grand. And while it is a little galling how much the prices have risen over the last few years compared to (my) paltry wages, that was partly a consequence of rising labour and material costs, the pandemic and of course the associated craze for wrist watches as investments (I know, it sounds funny now doesn't it?).

But clearly the watch market is cooling off now (you only need look at the pre-owned sector where sales are coming thick and fast) so you'd think that prices would stabilise - but it feels like we need to go through a little more pain before there is an adjustment, and with China and potentially India offering new opportunities for the Swiss perhaps that will be even longer coming than we'd really like. 

Still you'd hope a price rise would be something like inflationary, but we know the Swiss like to keep ahead of inflation... so realistically a figure of 5-6% would be... while not exactly 'acceptable', at least 'expected'. And after all, quibbling over £200 when you're spending literally thousands of pounds isn't really the point of luxury goods buying, is it?

Anyway, I cracked on and started with the Aquaracers... and by and large it was more or less as I imagined. Yes the 'newish' 42mm Aquaracers had gone up already and a GMT at £4000 seems rather a lot, but really it was a 10% increase or thereabouts, so yes a bit annoying but nothing we haven't seen in the recent past and for a lot of the watches it was indeed £50, £100, £150, £250... 

In fact, the first dramatic change I noticed was that the two solid gold Aquaracers (WBP5150 and WBP5152) had dropped £3200 (from £16550 to £13350).

Except someone at Beaverbrooks messed it up and changed it to £135,350... which was quite funny.

This was most surprising, I mean, yes I always thought they were punching high with those prices, but when was the last time a Swiss manufacturer brought the price of anything down, let alone by that kind of margin? Clearly they weren't selling, so no major risk involved in annoying customers who'd purchased at the higher price I presume!

Even so, this is a highly unusual move and one can't help but be surprised as the usual route to dispose of watches like this would surely be to quietly withdraw them from sale and move them to the outlets where they could be offered at sizeable discounts without causing any embarrassment.

Still mildly reeling from this, I continued on to the Carreras... and here's where I got my second shock of the morning. Again it was mostly as expected, £50 here, £100 there, until I got to two of the 36mm Carreras; the WBN2351 (MOP dial, diamond bezel, two tone bracelet) which had gone up from £6050 (already rather a lot if you ask me) to a simply jaw dropping £8200 and the WBN2350 (gold dial, gold bezel, two tone bracelet), which rose from £4350 to a remarkable £6400. 

These increases represent 36% and 47% respectively - which is hard to reconcile, but if there is any good news it's that 47% is the highest rise I found. But only just... as we'll see shortly.

Then I noticed that the gold and titanium Extreme Sport Carrera skeleton had gone up from £10750 to £12050... which is a 12% increase, nowhere near as dramatic admittedly, but still a very sizeable jump. But all of this really pales into insignificance when we come to the tourbillons...

If you've been in the watch game a while, you will surely remember the wonderfully entertaining Mr Jean Claude Biver launching the Carrera tourbillons way back in 2016. Mr Biver of course rather upset the rest of the Swiss watch industry with his £15,000 Swiss-made tourbillons because they were quite used to charging £100,000 or more... but JCB was sure that TAG Heuer's place in the market was 'entry level' and he was determined to bring 'affordable luxury' to the masses. And God bless him for that.

But, you know... was that the right thing to do? Sure it brought the tourbillon into the reach of mere mortals like me who could 'potentially' sell all their watches and buy one - but was that ever really the point? I remember watching a video a few months ago with Luxury Bazaar's 'Roman Sharf' and somebody asked a question about the 'cheap' TAG Heuer tourbillon and he said he thought it was 'stupid'. Why? Because the whole point of a tourbillon is that it's a flex, it's something you brag about costing a lot of money. If it's 'cheap' then what's the point?

Now, as a watch enthusiast I find that a little offensive (though not as offensive as when he melted down a solid gold 2000 Exclusive to make a fricking belt buckle or something... Jesus that made my blood boil) but I'm sorry to say that he probably has a point. I don't really believe every tourbillon owner (or even the majority of them) buys them for the love of Louis Breguet's invention, no... I'm sorry, but the truth is for an awful lot of people a tourbillon is basically a badge that says 'my watch costs more than yours'. 

And I can't help but think that maybe the 'affordable tourbillon' idea was probably a little bit short-sighted. Sure they probably sold quite a lot of them initially, but once the novelty wore off and the demand diminished it was bound to become a bit of an issue eventually. In fact with the original 45mm modular Carrera tourbillons being rather long in the tooth at this point I'm surprised they hadn't already taken the opportunity to discontinue them and start over. But strangely they didn't; the new glassbox Carrera tourbillons came out at just under £20,000 (broadly where the older versions had ended up after 8 years of price increases) and so JCB's dream of relatively affordable tourbillons 'for everyone' persisted... at least until the 6th of January 2025.

Now maybe we should have seen it coming? After all, the disparity between the prices TAG Heuer were asking for the new Senna and Porsche Panamericana tourbillons and the rest of the range was absolutely glaring. And we know from experience that TAG Heuer tend to apply price rises to new products before launch so that they don't release them and then immediately have to put them up again (for example the two new two-tone Solargraphs which were released in December and which remain unchanged). But I guess we didn't put two and two together... probably because it made no sense!  

And yes, the Senna tourbillon was judged very harshly by the Council (myself included) largely due to the huge price differential over it's siblings, but of course now the price changes have been applied and suddenly it doesn't look anything like as egregious. For example, the CBU5080 Extreme Sport Carrera in titanium was £22,800 on the 5th of January, but as of the 6th of Jan it now costs £32,200, a 41% price hike. I know it's a bit of a backwards way of looking at it, but in that light the Senna actually doesn't look so bad!

Before we go any further lets have a little look at exactly what happened on the 6th of Jan.

Click to Enlarge Image

Pretty ballsy on TAG Heuer's part I'd have to say, but I'm sure they know what they are doing. And in a couple of years people will probably forget they ever could have had a tourbillon Carrera for less than £20k, after all there's always new people coming into the market, or indeed people looking at TAG Heuer because they've moved into 'their' price range. Crazy as that sounds the pricing of luxury goods doesn't tend to follow normal logic, and simply raising prices can make previously uninteresting products appealing to certain people. People who previously considered a £20,000 tourbillon too cheap to be a worthy flex.

It just seems an odd way to go about it. Surely it would have made more sense to at least try and 'hide' it, but perhaps the opportunity was missed and now they've decided on this rather brave course of action instead.

Because can you imagine working in a boutique and there's some guy comes by every couple of weeks and drools over the same tourbillon in the window. Then one day he finally comes in to buy it and you have to tell him, oh sorry that one's not £20k anymore it's £30k. It's not a good look. I mean, by all means put them up 10-15% a year for five years if that's where you think they should be, but this certainly would rub me up the wrong way if I was in the market.

But I think those kind of buyers are few and far between. The tourbillons are really aimed at people who can well afford £20-30k for a watch, and probably more than one a year. Remember that old saying that 'if the price of a watch makes no sense to you then it's probably not aimed at you'?

And well, to be honest, I was never going to buy a tourbillon at £20,000 so if it's £30,000 or £50,000 it really doesn't make that much difference to me personally... 

But what does this mean for the pre-owned market? Oddly enough I've noticed that Watchfinder have had the blue glassbox tourbillon on their website for a little while now, priced at around £14,000. But of course now that watch no longer has a list price of £19,995 it's £30,400... so do they put the watch up? Even though it has patently failed to sell at the old price? Tough one that. On the one hand suddenly it looks like an absolute bargain; but it will be interesting to see if it moves any quicker or if that represents the accepted value of this now £30,000 watch on the used market. 

But how does that look to a buyer who wants to buy new? If they see the watch they want to buy for £30,000 on sale (a year old) for £14,000 with a reputable pre-owned dealer who doesn't exactly have a reputation for being 'cheap'... well, that's not exactly inspiring confidence that they will be able to recoup their outlay if they decide they want to move it on does it? 

That's why this course of action is 'brave', because they are opening themselves up to some awkward conversations here when all they really needed to do was launch new products at new prices, just as Mr Biver did with the Heuer 01; he knew he couldn't bring existing Carreras down in price, so he created a new line and priced it to sell (while shouting at length about how it really ought to be £8000 - genius!).

Maybe this will work, but I wouldn't like to be a salesman trying to sell a £30,000 watch to a guy who says, "Oh yeah, I remember when these were £20,000.... like two months ago". 

Awkward, eh?

But all is not completely lost if you're in the market for a TAG Heuer tourbillon... at the time of writing I notice that some of the distributor network is yet to put their prices up, so if you're quick you might still be able to pick these watches up at the old prices from places such as Laings, CW Sellors, Beaverbrooks or Chisolm Hunter.

Or similarly you could pay £3200 over the odds for a solid gold Aquaracer... 🤣