What Dealers Can't Sell Right Now | The Watchlist

How to double a watch's price in 6 months, + the April Unpolished recap.

It kinda seems like all anyone wants to talk about is prices.

Especially around Watches and Wonders, there’s a tendency to focus on the expensive stuff: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Universal Genève, even the new Naoya Hida.

The vintage market is also hot. Sotheby’s just sold a bunch of Cartiers, one of them a Crash that became the most expensive Cartier ever, selling for $2m (to the same company that bought Jane Birkin’s Birkin).

I didn’t want to write another diatribe about prices. It’s not that it’s unwarranted—go off!—but it can show a lack of imagination, or at least an inability to explore beyond the handful of watches that are very expensive, hot, or hard to get. The fun of collecting was never joining the cult of Journe, but finding the hidden nooks and crannies.

“People love to complain about [prices], but when there are good values they don’t want it,” says dealer Kevin O’Dell, “because they want what’s hot and they also want it to be cheap.”

People want what other people want is a basic fact of the human condition, perhaps exacerbated by social media.

Instead of focusing on the hot watches that sell immediately, I texted a few dealers the question: “What are some watches you’ve had listed for a while that offer a ton of value but no one’s paying attention to right now?”

Here’s what they’re sitting on.

In today’s Watchlist: Dealers on where to find value, including watches for sale right now, and a few new eBay saved searches for you (IWC, Rolex, Jaeger-LeCoultre, field watches, and more); then, how to double a watch’s price in 6 months; plus an April recap.