Come rain or shine there's one thing of which you can be sure, the Swiss will raise the prices of watches, and probably faster than inflation or wages. But you want the latest watches on your wrist... so what can you do? Well, if you can wait a few months, the truth is you can save yourself a lot of money. No you won't get the full 'boutique' experience, but honestly is a glass of champagne and a free hat worth a thousand pounds to you? If so then maybe you don't need to read the rest of this post... for everyone else, please read on!
So look, of course it's easy to find 'deals' online and we all know what an absolute cess-pit the internet is... so for the purposes of this post I'm going to restrict myself to looking at what Watchfinder can offer. Now I have no special 'relationship' with Watchfinder to declare, the only thing I've had from them was a complimentary service and polish one time, which I'm still a little confused about... but anyway, the reason I'm looking at Watchfinder particularly is simply that they aren't renowned as being the cheapest of the cheap, but I've always had good service from them and they offer a two year warranty on everything they sell, so it's as good as buying new as you're going to get.
And to be honest, if you're buying a current 'in-house' movement TAG Heuer you will still get their five year warranty anyway, so happy days!
Regardless, the point of this post is really not to plug Watchfinder specifically, but just to point out that there are deals to be had and you don't have to fall back on models from five years ago to get a nice watch at a decent price (though personally I probably still would, if only because the watches of 2020 beat the watches of 2025, but that's just my opinion, naturally).
Yes indeed, the idea of 'watches as investments' is dead in the water (thankfully), unless you're looking at Rolex and possibly some of the more sought after pieces from other higher end manufacturers. Hopefull no one is buying a Carrera (or a Monaco) in 2025 with the idea that they'll be able to sell it for more than they paid in the future. It just ain't happening. And that. my friends, is a good thing.
Not for the manufacturers of course, they love that shit, and it's a great reason to put their prices up (as if they needed one). But you can beat the price rises if you play your cards right. For example, Watchfinder currently have a WBP1180 titanium Solargraph on a bracelet for £1765. The current list price of that watch is a whopping £3000. For a solar quartz watch. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice watch and I do sometimes wish that I'd bought that one instead of my carbon Solargraph, but at £3000 it's just not viable. At £1765 I'm inclined to 'think' about selling mine and switching over...
Next up we have the 39mm Carrera glassbox Skipper, a watch that a lot of people have a soft spot for. But with a list price of £6500 it's one that a lot of people just can't justify. But here we see it's available for a much more reasonable £4300. Quite a chunk of change that. More than enough to buy the titanium Solargraph as a daily beater in fact (and have a nice meal out with your wife to celebrate!).
Then we have the Superdiver. It's always been a hard sell at full list price, and it's one of the few watches that actually came down in the last price 'adjustment'. Even so, at £5550 it's still a lot of money for what I honestly believe is no one's 'only' watch. But as we see, you can get it today for a much more reasonable £3255.
One of my favourite watches of the last few years is the Carrera Porsche Racing Orange Lava Special Edition, but the price has always been a stretch, that and the fact that I don't have a Porsche of course. But even this super desirable watch can be had at a goodly reduction. I mean £4785 is still a lot of money, but it's a lot less than the current list price of £6700.
And what about the Bling Lord? Another watch I'd love to add to my collection, even if I did say I was done when I got my '160th Dato Carrera' - no one believed that, surely. Oddly priced at an almost 'reasonable' £7850 (considering the DLC coating and rose gold elements, and of course the hilarious price of the skeletonised models) this one can still be had at a £2750 discount.
Which would be enough to snag you a 2024 Aquaracer 'Batman'! Currently priced at a pretty ambitious (in my opinion) £4050, you can get one here for the much more attractive price of £2595!
Of course, the higher up the ladder you go, the greater the depreciation, as this carbon Monza shows. Now I'm not 100% sure if this is still exactly 'current', but these kinds of models' status are always a bit more 'fluid' as they tend to hang around in boutiques even if they are not actually officially available online, so I think it's worth drawing your attention to this one as well. Quite an enormous saving to be made there!
And continuing even higher up the order we come to the glassbox tourbillon. A bit of an odd one this, because TAG Heuer put the price of this watch up by a staggering amount at the start of the year, which has distorted the comparison considerably. But even so, the saving over new will buy you the first FIVE watches on this list. Given that the chances of this being in any way fake are laughably small, I cannot fathom why anyone would buy this new when this is available. And yet, it sits on the WF website, month after month after month. It's clearly still too expensive, which speaks volumes.
And what of the 2024 Limited Edition Seafarer (launched in collaboration with Hodinkee last year), a sure fire investment you might have thought, bearing in mind what happened to some of the other 'Dinky' limited editions... but no. Despite (or perhaps because of, truthfully) being limited to just 968 pieces the watch is still available on the TAG Heuer website for £7250, but also available from Watchfinder for £5665, a substantial £1585 cheaper.
In fact, if you actually wanted to buy a TAG Heuer as an investment, what you should have done was bought the 'Time & Tide' limited edition 'Sundowner' Solargraph. This one is available from Watchfinder for a fairly laughable £6950... but also it's on Chrono 24 for £4750, and I can't find one for anywhere near it's original price. So well done if you bought one of those!
As I said, this is not about plugging Watchfinder, I just wanted a credible used seller to use as a bassline rather than picking random watches off eBay or Chrono 24 from sellers I've never heard of. The point is, current watches are definitely available for less than list, and if nothing else that should be a valid point to make if you are trying to negotiate a discount from your AD.
At the end of the day and all flippancy aside, of course it's still 'better' to buy new. We'd all love to be able to buy what we want without even thinking about it and the reassurance of buying from an AD and knowing 100% that you have the genuine article definitely has a value... but sometimes you want what you can't really afford, and also it's worth considering how much value your brand new watch will actually lose as soon as you take it out of the showroom.
It seems that most watches are more like cars than stocks in 2025, so treat them accordingly and DON'T expect your new Monaco or Carrera to be worth more than you paid for it when you come to sell it.
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