The luxury watch market moves more than $70 billion a year. Individual watches regularly sell for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars. They cross borders. They involve lawyers, shippers, insurance companies, and customs agents.
And yet, most of these deals still happen the same way you would buy something on Craigslist.
There is a word for the system that fixes this: a clearinghouse. A clearinghouse sits between a buyer and a seller. It holds the money, checks the goods, sets the rules, and decides what happens if something goes wrong. Every serious financial market has one.
The watch market does not.
Big Money, Small Infrastructure
The watch market is bigger than most people realize.
New watch retail is estimated at about $50 billion a year. The used market adds roughly another $25 billion on top of that. Combined, the global watch market exceeds $70 billion annually.
And it is growing fast. In 2025, tracked used watch transactions hit $16.73 billion, up 36.4% in a single year. These are not casual hobbyist sales. 79 individual watches sold for over $1 million each in 2025 alone.
The buyers are also global. Asia-Pacific accounts for over 41% of the market. That means most high-value deals cross at least one international border.
Now here is the problem.
The systems supporting all of this were built for a much smaller, simpler market. Listings are not legally binding. Buyers often wire money before anyone checks the watch. Authentication is optional. If something goes wrong, everyone points at someone else.
The buyer almost always loses.
The Correction That Proved the Point
From 2022 to mid-2025, used watch prices fell for 13 quarters straight. Prices dropped 10.7% in 2023 and another 6.1% in 2024.
The falling prices did not break the market, but they did expose how fragile the system underneath it really was.
Without clear rules about who holds the money, who verifies the watch, and what happens when a deal falls apart, online deals were challenging. Buyers could not trust sellers. Sellers could not trust buyers. Platforms avoided taking responsibility. When things went wrong, nobody was clearly in charge.
In 2025, prices finally turned positive, up 4.9% for the year. But the gains were highly uneven. Patek Philippe rose 12.1%. Rolex rose 4.6%. Those two brands, along with Cartier and Omega, carried the entire market. Meanwhile 28 out of 35 tracked brands still lost value.
Four brands holding up an entire market is a sign that value is concentrating at the top while the rest of the market waits for better infrastructure.
Every Other Market Already Solved This
This is not a new problem. It has been solved before, in basically every other market that handles serious money.
Stock markets moved from handshake deals between brokers to centralized clearing systems. The DTCC in the US now clears trillions of dollars in trades every day. Banks moved from informal agreements to standardized global payment systems. Commodity markets built exchanges with clear rules, margin requirements, and processes for handling failures. Credit card networks created systems that protect both buyers and sellers from fraud and disputes. Even the diamond industry, which used to run entirely on personal reputation, eventually standardized around independent certification.
The pattern is the same every time. When a market grows large enough and complex enough, informal trust stops working. The market builds real infrastructure.
Watches are the last major asset class that has not done this yet.
Why Existing Platforms Cannot Fix It
The current platforms were not built to solve this problem. They were built as marketplaces to connect buyers and sellers for a fee.
Their business model depends on staying out of the middle. They do not hold money. They do not own the inventory. They do not take responsibility if a deal goes wrong. They use their terms and conditions to make sure the risk stays with the buyer and seller, not with them.
That works fine when you are selling a $500 watch between two people in the same city. It does not work when you are moving a $200,000 watch from Tokyo to Miami with six parties involved.
Becoming real infrastructure requires a completely different business. You would have to hold funds in escrow. You would have to verify watches before they are listed. You would have to define exactly what happens when something breaks down. That changes your costs, your legal exposure, and your entire revenue model.
Discovery scales. Accountability does not.
Why the Problem Is Getting Bigger Right Now
Three things are happening at the same time.
Cross-border deals are now the default, and getting more complicated. Tariffs on Swiss watches in the United States at one point reached 39% in 2025. The Swiss franc keeps rising. Deals that used to be simple now involve real legal and financial complexity on both ends.
Money is concentrating at the top. Four brands held up the entire market in 2025 while most others lost value. High-value deals are becoming more common. One bad transaction at the seven-figure level is not just a financial loss. It destroys trust in the entire category.
A wealthier, more sophisticated buyer is entering the market. Global HNWI wealth reached $90.5 trillion in 2024, with 23.4 million wealthy individuals worldwide. Alternative investments now make up 15% of their portfolios. Deloitte's 2025 Swiss Watch Industry Study found that 40% of millennials and Gen Z plan to buy a pre-owned watch in the next year. Price is the primary reason, cited by 53% of buyers, up from 44% in 2021. These buyers come from financial markets. They know what good infrastructure looks like. They expect it.
The Rolex Certified Pre-Owned program shows both what works and what the limits are. It grew from about 25 retailers at the end of 2023 to 116 retailers operating 227 locations by mid-2025. It generated $590 million in sales in 2025. That growth proves people want structured, trustworthy transactions. But it only works for Rolex watches, sold by Rolex-approved dealers. It was not built to serve the full market, and it cannot.
What Actually Needs to Be Built
The fix is not complicated to describe. It is just hard to build if you are not willing to own the risk.
Money needs to be held in escrow before the watch moves. The watch needs to be verified before it is listed for sale. Authentication needs to be a requirement for completing the deal, not an optional add-on. Shipping and insurance need to be settled at the start, not negotiated in the middle. And when something goes wrong, the outcome needs to follow a clear process, not whoever shouts loudest.
In plain terms: a dealer should not be able to list a watch that has not been checked. Money should not move without a neutral party holding it. A deal should not close until the watch matches the listing.
None of this is new. It is exactly how clearing works in every asset class that has grown up. It just has not been applied to watches yet.
Systems like this do not usually get built because regulators demand them. They get built by someone who sees the gap early. Then the regulators show up later.
This is what we are building at AllChrono.
The Bottom Line
A $70 billion market does not need more listings. It does not need another app or another marketplace.
It needs the same thing every serious market eventually builds: a neutral system that holds money safely, verifies assets, and enforces outcomes.
The watch market will get there. The correction of 2022 to 2025 accelerated the timeline. The concentration of value into a handful of blue-chip references has made the problem impossible to ignore.
Markets do not stay fragmented forever. They build real systems. The secondary watch market has never been more ready for one.
Sources: EveryWatch, Secondary Market Movements Report — Year 2025 (February 2026); WatchCharts / Morgan Stanley, Swiss Watch Market Report Q4 2025 (January 2026); WatchCharts / Morgan Stanley, Swiss Watch Market Report Q3 2025 (October 2025); Capgemini Research Institute, World Wealth Report 2025 (June 2025); Deloitte Switzerland, Swiss Watch Industry Study 2025 (October 2025); Mordor Intelligence, Luxury Watch Market Report 2026; WatchPro, "Secondary market watch sales hit $17 billion in 2025" (February 2026).
— Christian Bruhn