The Field Caught Up

Rolex has lost market share in every major price segment since 2023.

Buyers under 30 have cut their Rolex spending by roughly 30% since 2022. The cohort that drove the boom is the one that left.

The Datejust is now Rolex's biggest earner at 28% of sales. Not the Submariner, not the Daytona. A dress watch from 1945 is out-earning every sports reference the brand makes, below explains a substantial part of why this is happening.

Microbrands have moved upmarket as a group, and there is one specific Swiss movement behind it that nobody is writing about.

A brand raising its prices and a watch appreciating are different events. Corniche is at $700 retail with used examples at $175. Check the secondary before you accept the retail.

Two men climbed seven floors in Paris for a $743,000 Richard Mille.

F.P. Journe warned collectors about counterfeits the same autumn it has two unique lots at Phillips.

Our Rolex Four Seasons call stands. Over $30 million for the four lots on 28 September.

Two men scaled the Plaza Athénée for a single watch. In the early hours of Wednesday, burglars climbed the exterior façade of the Paris hotel to a seventh-floor room and left with a Richard Mille valued at roughly $743,000, along with jewellery. Total loss close to $1.2 million.

The detail that matters is how they got in. The bay window had been left open. No forced door, no broken glass, no alarm. This on a building with camera coverage running the length of its avenue Montaigne façade and security on site around the clock.

For context, Paris has recorded dozens of high-value watch robberies this year, including several other Richard Milles. Bulky, instantly recognisable watches are instantly recognisable to thieves as well.

Chrono24 published eight years of transaction data, and the picture has shifted. The report, released Wednesday and covering completed sales from 2018 through the second quarter of this year, found Rolex still leads at 31% of dollar volume, ahead of Omega at 11% and Patek Philippe at 6%.

But the brand has lost market share in every major price segment since 2023, with Cartier, Patek, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin all gaining ground. The pandemic premium around Rolex has largely disappeared, and marketplace share has returned to something closer to pre-2019 levels.

Two findings underneath that are more interesting than the headline, and The Breakdown takes them up properly.

F.P. Journe issued a counterfeit warning. A social media post this week advised collectors to exercise the utmost vigilance given a rise in counterfeit watches, clocks and related products.

Worth reading alongside the auction results. Journe set a $13.9 million record this spring and has two unique lots at Phillips this autumn. Counterfeiters follow value, and a brand producing a few hundred watches a year at those prices is an obvious target. Module Three of the Playbook covers what actually catches them.

WatchPro published an editorial arguing this market has become unhealthily obsessed with prices. Their case: the boom and bust since 2020 has turned everything into a price story. Rolex trading above retail was news. Rolex falling below retail was news. The Nautilus bubble was news, and so was its correction.

We publish price analysis twice a week, so this is worth engaging with rather than ignoring. Our response is in The Numbers.

Microbrands are leaving the price bracket that defined them. Furlan Marri, founded on Kickstarter in 2021, now sits above $2,000. Studio Underd0g, which began as a lockdown project, is at $675. Unimatic's new Modello Quattro runs $700 for the time-only and $840 for the GMT, limited to 99 pieces in 65 grams of titanium.

There is a specific technical reason this happened simultaneously across the category, and almost nobody has written about it. The Pattern explains.

And a cautionary note from the same segment. Corniche now lists La Grande Corniche near $700 with a Seiko NH35 movement inside, and a limited edition at $922. Used examples on eBay are currently changing hands at $175 to $200.

Retail roughly doubled. The secondary market did not move. Those are not the same event and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

Below: the collection that quietly became Rolex's biggest earner, the movement that let an entire category move upmarket, and where we agree with our critics.

Where our critics are right

The argument. WatchPro published an editorial this week arguing that the boom and bust since 2020 has encouraged an unhealthy obsession with prices. Rolex trading above retail was news. Rolex falling below retail was news. The Nautilus bubble was news, and so was its correction.

We are a publication built on price reporting, so this is aimed at what we do, and the honest response is that a meaningful part of it is correct.

The part we agree with

Price movement is not the same as significance, and this market routinely treats them as identical.

A reference moving 2% in a quarter is noise in a market this illiquid. Publishing it as a finding, week after week, trains readers to react to fluctuations that mean nothing. Module Seven Chapter 9 makes the same argument internally: read the market to manage risk, not to make predictions.

And an obsession with price crowds out everything else. Finishing, design, history, the actual experience of wearing a watch. If the only question a publication ever asks is what something is worth, it has stopped being about watches.

Where we would push back

Knowing what something is worth and obsessing over it are different activities.

A dealer who cannot price a reference accurately loses money. A buyer who does not understand that retail, grey, secondary and auction are four different numbers overpays. Module One Chapter 1 exists because that confusion is the most expensive error a newcomer makes.

The problem is not that prices get reported. It is that they get reported without explanation.

A headline saying a reference rose 8% tells you nothing. The same figure with the mechanism attached, whether it is a discontinuation, a supply overhang, an inventory cycle or a taste shift, is genuinely useful. One is a scoreboard. The other is an argument.

The standard we are setting ourselves

Every price figure in this publication should come with a reason. If we report that something moved and cannot explain why, it does not belong in the issue.

That is the distinction we would offer, and the editorial is a fair reminder to hold to it.

The buyers who drove the boom are the ones who left

The position. Chrono24's data does not describe a Rolex problem. It describes a market that has stopped concentrating, and the clearest signal in it is generational.

The headline numbers. Rolex holds 31% of dollar volume on the platform. Omega 11%. Patek 6%. Rolex remains, by a wide margin, the largest brand on the largest marketplace.

And it has lost share in every major price segment since 2023. Not one segment. Every one. Cartier, Patek, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin have all gained.

The generational finding

Buyers under 30 have reduced the share of their spending devoted to Rolex by roughly 30% since 2022.

That figure deserves a moment. The same cohort that drove the pandemic boom, that queued and paid over retail and made waiting lists a cultural phenomenon, has cut its Rolex allocation by nearly a third in three years.

They have not left the market. They are buying dressier watches and a wider set of challenger brands.

Chrono24's head of brand engagement put it directly: the pandemic premium is unwound, and the clearest signal is generational. Younger buyers drove the boom and they are the ones now moving to other brands.

The finding almost nobody will report

The Datejust is now Rolex's largest revenue-generating collection, at 28% of sales.

Not the Submariner. Not the GMT-Master II. Not the Daytona. A dress watch introduced in 1945 is out-earning every sports reference the brand makes.

This confirms something we covered two weeks ago from a completely different source. Robb Report's dealer reporting found small case sizes dramatically outperforming larger ones, with one dealer holding a single unit of a reference they would normally stock seven of. Two unconnected datasets, one behavioural and one transactional, pointing the same direction.

And the demographic detail completes it: women devote a larger share of their watch spending to Rolex than men do, and favour the Datejust and Oyster Perpetual specifically.

The references the trade still describes as ladies' watches are the ones carrying the brand's revenue.

What it actually means

Read one way, this is a Rolex story about lost dominance. That reading is available and we think it is the weaker one.

The better reading is Chrono24's own: Rolex has not retreated, the field around it has caught up. Prices remain well above pre-pandemic levels. The brand still sets the tone. What has changed is that buyers have stopped concentrating their money on a handful of hyped references.

The counterargument, which is real. This is one marketplace, not the whole market. Chrono24 skews toward certain buyer profiles and certain regions, and platform data is not the same as market data. Private and dealer-to-dealer transactions, which are most of this business, are invisible here.

It is also worth noting that North America has become Rolex's strongest region on the platform, with 35% of tracked sales there involving a Rolex, up from 27% in 2018. Losing share globally while gaining it in the largest growth market is a more complicated picture than the headline suggests.

For anyone holding inventory

Three things follow.

If your buying is weighted toward steel sports references on the assumption that is where demand concentrates, the data has been telling you otherwise for three years.

If you have been treating dress references and smaller cases as slow stock, that assumption is now measurably wrong.

And if you are building a client base among buyers under 30, understand that they are not shopping the way the generation before them did. Module Four Chapter 10 on pipeline is worth rereading with that in mind.

One movement let an entire category move upmarket

The shape of it. Microbrands have spent this year leaving the price bracket that defined them, and there is a specific technical reason almost nobody has written about.

The old formula, as one publication put it: take a Seiko movement, wrap it in a dive case borrowing heavily from something Swiss and expensive, keep it under $300, and lean on a good Instagram feed to move the first batch.

That still exists. But the interesting independents have outgrown it, and the honest observation attached to that is the one worth quoting: a few of them cost real money now, which is its own conversation.

The enabler

The La Joux-Perret G100.

It has become the preferred movement for brands moving upmarket in 2026, and the reason is dimensional rather than romantic. It offers a 68-hour power reserve and fits the same case dimensions as the Miyota 9-series and the Sellita SW200.

That means a brand can swap in a Swiss-made movement with a weekend-proof reserve without redesigning the watch around it, and keep the slim wearable cases buyers now demand.

One movement, dropped into existing case architecture, moved a whole category up a price tier. That is not a taste shift. It is a supply chain change with a pricing consequence.

Who actually made the jump

Furlan Marri is the clearest case. Founded on Kickstarter in 2021 by Andrea Furlan and Hamad Al Marri, built on Seiko meca-quartz. It won the GPHG Horological Revelation Prize in its launch year, sold a secular perpetual calendar at Only Watch 2023, and now runs Swiss mechanical movements from La Joux-Perret. It sits in the over $2,000 tier.

Baltic featured in Only Watch 2021 alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet, which is a sentence that would have been absurd about a French microbrand a decade ago. It now spans divers, chronographs and micro-rotor dress watches.

Unimatic took the opposite route and it is the more interesting decision. The Modello Quattro Ultratool is $700 for the time-only and $840 for the GMT, limited to 99 pieces, in 65 grams of grade 2 titanium with a proprietary shock system. They went quartz deliberately, rather than forcing a fragile automatic into a watch built to be abused.

Studio Underd0g now sits at $675, having started as a lockdown project. AnOrdain is doing enamel dials above $2,000. Brew, Trafford and Atelier Wen are all doing serious work.

The test that separates them

Not every brand that raised prices earned it, and there is a clean way to tell.

Corniche is the instructive counter-example. Fratello reported in 2020 that the brand deliberately kept its chronograph under $500. Today La Grande Corniche sits near $700 with a Seiko NH35 inside, and a limited edition lists new at $922.

Used Corniche on eBay right now: $175 to $200.

Retail roughly doubled. The secondary market did not follow.

The line that captures it, from an analysis of which microbrands collectors actually buy: hype is cheap, resale is honest. A brand holding 80 to 90% of its value secondhand is genuinely wanted. A brand whose retail climbed while its resale sat still has repositioned itself, which is a completely different thing.

Why this matters commercially

A brand raising its own prices and a watch appreciating are not the same event. They look identical from outside and they mean opposite things.

Module Two Chapter 2 covers this: retail price, market price and what you can actually sell for are three different numbers. The microbrand segment is currently the clearest live demonstration of that gap anywhere in the market.

If you are buying, check the secondary before you accept the retail. On some of these brands the gap is now wide enough to matter.

28 September, Phillips London. The Rolex Four Seasons. Our call stands: over $35 million for the four lots. It gets marked in this section the following week either way.

Around 20 September. August export figures from the Federation. July put the cumulative year at plus 0.9%, thin enough that one weak month reverses it. Given what Chrono24 has just published about Rolex share, the regional breakdown is worth reading closely.

Whether the Chrono24 findings hold in other data. One marketplace is not the market. If WatchCharts or EveryWatch report a similar pattern in their next releases, the diversification story becomes structural rather than platform-specific. That is the specific thing to check.

CVSTOS and Arman Tsarukyan. A hundred pieces, the brand's first ceramic case, and only the second athlete partnership CVSTOS has done. Athlete collaborations are usually a name licensed to a colour scheme, so whether this one is more than that is worth a look when it lands. The first batch has already sold out, the second batch of 50 is upcoming.

7 November, Geneva. 25 November, Singapore. Both Journe lots at Phillips, and the counterfeit warning issued this week sits directly alongside them.

If you are buying or selling anything mentioned above, the Concierge desk can source it or place it without you having to shop it around yourself.