How the Watch Market Changed: 2010 vs. 2026
Last updated: June 2026
Fifteen years ago you could walk into a Rolex dealer and buy a Submariner off the shelf, sometimes for under list price. What was hard was knowing what anything was actually worth, because there was no single place to look up a price. Today, that is reversed. Anyone can pull up a watch's market price in seconds, but you cannot simply walk in and buy the steel sports model you want at retail. Between 2010 and 2026, the friction in this industry shifted from knowing things to getting them, from your own homework to a dealer's allocation list. The Pre-owned and "grey market", where we operate, used to be the discount channel. Now it's the front door of the whole category.
This is the dealer's read on that shift, both sides of the counter. We are going to talk more about culture and exposure than about price charts, because culture changed first, and prices followed. Along the way, the famous names that pulled new eyes onto watches get their own deeper write-ups, linked as we go. For the short version: the watch world in 2026 is louder, more transparent, and far busier than the one we started the decade with.
easy to BUY
hard to KNOW
easy to KNOW
hard to GET
Collecting in 2010: a quiet, buyer-friendly market
Start with the conditions, because they are the opposite of what most people now assume. 2010 was a recovery year coming out of the financial crisis. Swiss watch exports had fallen more than 22 percent in 2009, the worst year in decades, and dealers were discounting to clear stock. Steel sports Rolex sat unsold in authorized-dealer windows. You could walk in and buy a Submariner or a GMT-Master at or below list, and often talk a few points off. The average pre-owned Rolex changed hands for around $2,000, per Bob's Watches sales data. The one real exception was the steel Daytona, which had carried a waitlist since the late 1980s. Everything else was there for the taking.
The watches now treated as permanently out of reach were ordinary catalog pieces then. The steel Patek Nautilus 5711, the future symbol of the entire craze, was a watch you could buy near retail, and as late as 2016 it still traded below its own list price secondhand. The brutal allocation game, where an authorized dealer decides who is allowed to buy a steel sports watch, did not arrive until later in the decade. In 2010, the watch itself was the easy part.
What was hard was knowing. There was no single place to look up what a reference was worth. You triangulated: dealer asking prices on Chrono24, which had aggregated listings since 2003, completed eBay sales to see what people actually paid, the sales corners on forums like TimeZone and RolexForums, and a young Bob's Watches pitching itself as a Kelley Blue Book for used Rolex. The information existed, but it was scattered and you assembled it by hand. The charted, instant market price a buyer takes for granted today simply did not exist yet.
How social media rewired demand
The change did not come from the magazines being replaced. It came from a parallel layer of discovery that needed no gatekeepers at all. Instagram turned into a watch-spotting machine in the early 2010s. Hodinkee built an audience now north of a million followers. On YouTube, a wave of creators turned watch knowledge into something you could absorb in your kitchen instead of a boutique, with Teddy Baldassarre alone past 600,000 subscribers. Sotheby's American head of watches put it bluntly in a 2024 Fortune piece:
Eight years ago, nobody was looking at watches on Instagram. Now, it's the most prevalent place to see a watch.Sotheby's American head of watches, Fortune, 2024
The most visible accelerant was the celebrity sighting. We are not going to pretend a celebrity makes a watch good, but we can tell you what we see: a documented sighting of the right person in the right reference reliably moves attention, and attention moves demand. A handful of names did more than anyone to drag watches into mainstream culture, and each one is worth its own page.
Kevin O'Leary has spent years running watch content on YouTube and wearing two watches at once, one on New York time and one on Abu Dhabi time, which is catnip for an audience that had never thought about a second time zone. Mark Zuckerberg went from a self-described non-watch guy to wearing a roughly $900,000 Greubel Forsey in a 2025 Meta video, after admiring a Richard Mille at the Ambani pre-wedding in 2024 and deciding, in his words, "watches are cool." John Mayer is the rare collector who moves prices by himself, to the point that an entire Rolex Daytona got nicknamed after him and Audemars Piguet built him his own Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar, a 200-piece limited edition. And Jay-Z spent twenty-five years turning Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet into household names through his lyrics, then in 2024 took an equity stake in a watch marketplace. None of these people sell for us. They simply put watches in front of audiences the industry could never have reached on its own.
The grey market grew up
While the audience exploded, the channel that serves most of that audience got respectable. For years the secondary market carried a whiff of the parking lot. Over the last decade it was bought, funded, and certified into something institutional.
The signposts are easy to line up. In 2018 Richemont, the group behind Cartier and Vacheron Constantin, bought the pre-owned seller Watchfinder, the first time a luxury conglomerate took over a used-watch business. In 2019 The RealReal, which authenticates every item with in-house horologists, went public on the Nasdaq. Money poured into the marketplaces: Chrono24 raised a nine-figure round in 2021 with Bernard Arnault's family fund among the backers, and WatchBox raised $165 million the same year, with investors including Michael Jordan. In late 2023 WatchBox merged with a set of established jewelers to form The 1916 Company, putting grey-market e-commerce and authorized retail under one roof.
The clearest sign that pre-owned had arrived came from the brands themselves. Rolex launched a Certified Pre-Owned program through the retailer Bucherer in December 2022, putting a two-year Rolex guarantee on used watches, and then bought Bucherer outright in 2023. Audemars Piguet announced its own certified program, and Richard Mille runs one through a tight network of partners. When the company that makes the watch decides to sell it to you secondhand with a warranty, the back room is officially the showroom. Deloitte now sizes the pre-owned market near $24 billion and expects it to rival the new-watch market within about a decade.
This is the part of the story where we live. We are a pre-owned and grey-market dealer, not an authorized dealer, and ten years ago that sentence needed an apology. It does not anymore.
Price transparency and the asset-class era
The single biggest change for a buyer is that the price is now public. Chrono24 became a de facto reference simply by listing hundreds of thousands of watches in one place. WatchCharts, founded in 2019, built market indexes tracking the secondary prices of the top brands. In 2023 Bloomberg co-launched a watch index with the dealer Subdial, which means a watch index now scrolls past the same screens that carry stock quotes. Knight Frank's luxury index has watches up roughly 125 percent over ten years. Watches did not just become collectible, they became trackable, and being trackable made them feel like an asset.
You can watch that asset behave like one, out in the open, which is new. The boom ran into early 2022, when the average watch sold secondhand peaked around $45,000 and the hottest steel sports models traded at several times retail. Then it corrected, hard and on the record: secondary prices dropped by roughly a third, hit a two-year low in late 2023, and have been climbing back since, reaching a fresh two-year high in January 2026. The poster child is the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711, discontinued in 2021 — the arc above is its blue-dial version, still trading at several times its old list price.
None of this makes a watch an investment. Prices that go up in public also go down in public, as the 2023 correction reminded everyone. Treat the numbers above as market history, not a forecast, and assume any individual watch's value swings with its condition, its box and papers, and who is selling it.
A new, wider buyer
All of that exposure brought in people the industry spent decades not talking to. That youth showed up in the auction room: Sotheby's had its biggest share of buyers thirty-and-under on record in 2023. Deloitte's 2025 study found that more than half of younger consumers intend to buy a traditional watch, and named women and Gen Z as the two biggest growth areas. The map redrew itself too: by 2024 the United States had become the single largest market for Swiss watch exports, as Hong Kong, the center of gravity in 2010, slipped down the table.
The same wave lifted the cheap end, which is the part people forget. The Swatch and Omega MoonSwatch landed in March 2022 at around $260, drew lines around the block in a dozen cities, and sold more than a million units in eight months. The Tissot PRX gave a new collector a genuine automatic for about $650. A twenty-dollar Casio became a credible answer on watch TikTok, where a single video about one pulled over four million views. Exposure did not only inflate the grails. It widened the door at the bottom, and a lot of people who walked through it on a $260 Swatch are the same people emailing us about a Rolex two years later.
How the dealer's job changed
You couldn't look up what it was worth.
We have the watch, we stand behind it, and we move fast.
Put all of this together and the dealer's job runs on a different footing than in 2010. A customer walks in already knowing the reference number, the going secondary rate, and what the same watch closed at on three platforms last week. We see it every day. The visible spread between those platforms, often 5 to 15 percent on the same reference, is exactly what keeps everyone honest.
At the same time the brands made the new watch harder to get, not easier. Allocation on the hot steel sports models runs through the authorized dealer, who decides which customer earns one, which pushed a lot of demand straight to the secondary market where the watch is simply in stock. This squeeze is recent. Steel sports watches were broadly buyable at retail until around 2016, when the first ceramic-bezel Daytona sold out the morning it was announced. By 2018 a veteran dealer was telling the trade he had never seen shortages like it, and by 2019 a steel Rolex at list price had become a running joke. So our value deepened: we have useful knowledge for buyers regarding which models may suit them best, their true value (is it hyped, does it carry a new-release premium tax, or will it stand the test of time?). We also provide value to buyers by actually having the watch or sourcing it through connections, standing behind it, authenticating it, and moving quickly. That's tougher on us as the dealer, but better for the buyer, and we'll take that deal every time.
Where the market stands in 2026
The watch market of 2026 is bigger, younger, and more transparent than the one we knew in 2010, and the secondary market sits at the center of it instead of the margins. The famous names helped get it here by making watches something the general public actually talks about, and the platforms and indexes made sure that once people were curious, they could find a real price instead of a rumor. For a dealer who has no boutique waitlist to offer and never did, a market that runs on the actual watch and the actual number is the market we always wanted. If you want to go deeper on the people who pulled the crowd in, the collector write-ups linked below are the place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the watch market different in 2026 than in 2010?
The biggest change is transparency. In 2010, pre-owned pricing lived in private phone calls and forums; in 2026, public platforms and indexes like Chrono24, WatchCharts and the Bloomberg x Subdial index make secondary prices visible to anyone. Social media also pulled in a far larger, younger, more global audience, and the pre-owned market grew from a back-room business into an institutional channel that brands now participate in directly.
Did social media really change the watch industry?
Yes, mostly on the demand side. Instagram watch-spotting, watch YouTube, and high-profile collectors moved watch knowledge out of boutiques and magazines and in front of millions of new people. Sotheby's has called Instagram the most prevalent place people now see a watch, and in 2023 about 30 percent of its watch lots went to buyers thirty and under.
Is the pre-owned watch market legitimate now?
It is. Over the last decade the secondary market attracted major capital and luxury-group ownership, public companies like The RealReal, and brand-run certified pre-owned programs from Rolex, Audemars Piguet and others. Deloitte sizes the pre-owned market near $24 billion and expects it to rival the new-watch market within roughly a decade.
Are luxury watches a good investment?
We would not buy one expecting it to be. Some references have appreciated sharply and watch indexes have outperformed many collectibles over ten years, but the 2023 correction, when secondary prices fell about a third from their 2022 peak, shows prices fall in public too. Buy a watch because you want to wear it. Treat any value it holds as a bonus, not a plan, and remember that condition, box and papers drive what any individual piece is worth.
What happened to Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 prices?
The steel 5711 became the symbol of the boom. After Patek discontinued it in 2021, the blue-dial version peaked around $131,000 in 2022, fell toward $80,000 during the 2023 correction, and has recovered into the low six figures by mid-2026. Exact figures vary by reference and condition, which is why a current, dated source matters more than a headline number.
Sources: Hodinkee founding (2008) and Chrono24 (founded 2003) per company records; the 2009 Swiss watch export decline of 22.3 percent per the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, the soft, discount-friendly 2009-2010 retail market and a roughly $2,000 average pre-owned Rolex per Bob's Watches sales data (via Quill & Pad), and the steel-sports allocation crisis dated to the 2016 ceramic Daytona, 2018 trade reporting (WatchPro) and 2019 rather than the early 2010s, with the Patek Nautilus 5711 still trading at or below its retail price as late as 2016 per Quill & Pad; Richemont's acquisition of Watchfinder (2018), The RealReal Nasdaq IPO (June 2019), Chrono24's 2021 funding round (General Atlantic with Aglaé Ventures), WatchBox's $165M raise (2021) and its 2023 merger into The 1916 Company per CNBC, WWD, National Jeweler and Robb Report; Rolex Certified Pre-Owned launch via Bucherer (December 2022) and Rolex's acquisition of Bucherer (2023) per Rolex and National Jeweler; pre-owned market size (~$24B, projected to rival new) per Deloitte Swiss Watch Industry Insights 2024. Price-index points (WatchCharts, Bloomberg x Subdial, Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index) and the 2022 peak / 2023 trough / 2026 recovery per CNBC, Bloomberg and Knight Frank; the Patek 5711 peak (~$131,000, 2022) and current low-six-figure trading reflect WatchCharts and Chrono24 readings as of mid-2026 and vary by exact reference and condition. Buyer demographics per Sotheby's (via Fortune, 2024) and Deloitte (2025); MoonSwatch figures (March 2022 launch, ~$260, 1M+ units in eight months) per Bloomberg and WatchPro; Tissot PRX and WatchTok figures per WatchPro and Robb Report; US overtaking Hong Kong in Swiss exports per Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry 2024 data. Secondary-market commentary reflects our experience as a dealer and is not financial advice; values vary by condition, completeness of box and papers, and seller. Watches Off 5th is an independent pre-owned and grey-market dealer with no authorized-dealer relationships.