Four Market Storylines for Vintage Watches in 2025

1) Will the price gap between average condition and excellent condition continue to grow?

I am amazed how many people want their first vintage watch to be in excellent condition and the general awareness about the importance of vintage watch condition. It’s extremely hard to find unpolished watches – truly unpolished watches versus the polished or recut cases that many dealers call unpolished. We sell fewer than 10 Rolex GMT-Master reference 1675s a year that are unpolished and the same for vintage Rolex Submariner reference 5513s and 5512s. I think the Rolex CPO program has actually been a huge boom for Wind Vintage and interest in vintage watches generally (in general, the watches I have seen offered in the CPO program have not been awesome with the exception of the new Rolex CPO vintage watch shop by Seddiqi – the Rolex authorized dealer for the United Arab Emirates based in Dubai - that focuses more on Day-Dates, and precious metal gemset models), so thank you, Rolex!

2) Will interest in vintage Heuer continue to grow?

I am pretty bullish on vintage Heuer watches. After the vintage Heuer market superheated and exploded like a ball of aluminum foil in a microwave in the wake of the Phillips Heuer Parade thematic auction disaster in 2017, it took years for the market to recover. Vintage Heuer watches were some of my first loves: I love the dials, the cases, and the colors that Heuer used on its vintage watches, particularly in that 1960s to 1970s timeframe. However, I also love the purpose-built chronographs and models that are lesser known from the 1930s to the 1950s. I was part of a vintage Heuer collector gathering at the TAG Heuer headquarters in November and there is a strong and new group of collector coming in to the market and the older collectors also have renewed confidence to buy vintage Heuers again. TAG Heuer and LVMH are now the official timekeepers for Formula 1 and there is a general stronger positive feeling about the brand than in the past.

3) Will Universal Geneve remain the hottest non-Rolex and non-Patek vintage brand?

Vintage Universal Geneve watches went from pretty quiet and a generally sleepy market of buyers in 2022 to renewed interest at the end of 2023 with the news of the acquisition of the brand by the owners of Breitling to extremely hot in 2024. It’s been an honor and somewhat of a “Pince me, am I sleeping?” experience to serve on the Advisory Board of Universal Geneve and to be part of the discussions around the relaunch of the brand. If I had a dollar for every time someone wrote me an e-mail, text or Instagram message saying: “Can you find me a Universal Geneve Exotic Tri-Compax like the one you sold Bazamu?” I might be a thousandaire. I would expect interest to continue, but people are much more aware of condition and finding really great unpolished Eric Clapton Tri-Compax models and Nina Rindt Compax models is not easy. I know they will sell immediately if I can find them, however.

4) Are vintage Cartier watches going to remain relatively stable or are there certain models that will grow in value?

In general, the biggest storyline of vintage watches of the last two years was the explosive growth of interest and value for vintage Cartier watches. A London Crash selling for $1.6 million in a Loupe This online auction in May 2022 was sort of an inflection point for the vintage Cartier market. For 2024, the vintage Cartier market generally stabilized and there was not explosive growth in values, but there is such a diverse array of models and types of vintage Cartier watches made for the London, Paris, and New York markets that there are always new discoveries to be made and hyped up by dealers and collectors. It will be interesting to see what happens here, even though vintage Cartier watches are not really something Charlie Dunne or I aspire to own in our personal collections.