SDC Weekly 105; Inside Greubel Forsey; Managing Your "Completion Compulsion"; Consumer Trends 1H 2025 Update
Global Auction Sales Drop in 1H 2025, Rolex CPO public statement, LFdT LVMH Announces Watch Prize Semi-Finalists, Gen Z Relevance, A Historical Tech Tree, and more.
🚨 Welcome back to SDC Weekly!
Let’s begin with a rare statement from the crown regarding CPO pricing - this is something we’ve all assumed to be true, but which has never been confirmed until now:
“The Rolex Certified Pre-Owned programme (RCPO) allows Official Retailers who participate in it the freedom to independently set the prices of pre-owned watches at their own discretion. Rolex does not, under any circumstances, dictate or establish the resale prices of these watches”.
“Price variations for identical references among different Official Retailers can occur due to several factors, including – but not limited to – the cost of acquiring pre-owned watches, exchange rate fluctuations, required servicing based on the condition of the timepieces, and the retailer’s applied margins”.
Here’s a CPO premium recap from Morgan Stanley’s Q2 2025 Report:
So why is The 1916 company so much cheaper than everyone else? John Shmerler, CEO of The 1916 Company told WatchPro:
“The lynchpin to all of this is being able to service watches efficiently. Where we gambled, and got it right, was investing an enormous amount of resources into building a service centre that allows us to shorten the timeframe from the moment we buy a watch from a consumer to getting it certified by Rolex. If that cycle is taking the average retailer 10-12 weeks and we are doing it closer to 6-7 weeks, that is a huge competitive advantage…”
Admin note: Unofficial Editor has been momentarily detained by a kraken who objects to the Oxford comma. As negotiations continue offshore, click here to read this post online and ensure you see all corrections made after publishing.
If you’re new to SDC, welcome! If you have time to kill, find older editions of SDC Weekly here, and longer posts in the archive here.
Estimated reading time: ~24 mins