What Survives the First Owner

In the collection of Auckland Museum there is a small brass and steel watch movement, made in the twentieth century by the Waltham Watch Company, sitting in a two-part metal case with a glass window. It is not a finished watch. According to the museum's record, it was mounted so that a salesman could show prospective buyers how the movement looked and how well it was made¹². Someone decided that the most persuasive thing to show a customer was not the dial but the works.

That small object is a good place to begin a question that the luxury trade usually answers with a price tag: why do a few things keep their value after their first owner, while almost everything else loses it the moment it leaves the shop?

What the resale market says, and what it leaves out

The appetite for pre-owned goods is real and measurable. A report published in October 2025 by Boston Consulting Group and Vestiaire Collective forecast that the secondhand fashion and luxury market could reach up to 360 billion US dollars by 2030, growing about 10 per cent a year, roughly three times faster than the market for new goods¹. Among the 7,800 Vestiaire Collective users surveyed, secondhand purchases made up 40 per cent of the handbags they owned, and nearly 80 per cent named affordability as a top reason for buying¹. Note who was asked: people already using a resale platform. The figures describe a committed audience, not the public at large.

Watches tell a similar story. Deloitte's Swiss Watch Industry Study 2025, based in part on a survey of 6,500 consumers, found that 40 per cent of Generation Z respondents intended to buy a pre-owned watch in the following 12 months². The two main reasons given were affordability, cited by 53 per cent, and access to unique or no longer available models, cited by 36 per cent².

That second reason matters more than it first appears. Most buyers in these surveys are not chasing appreciation. They are looking for a better price, or for something the shop no longer sells. Resale, for most people, is a way of paying less, not a way of earning more.

The warning from 2022

Anyone tempted to treat a watch as a store of wealth should look closely at what happened next. The Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index, which tracks the 50 most traded watches by value on the secondary market, fell 42 per cent from its high in April 2022 to October 2023, according to Bloomberg³. Over the same period its Rolex index fell 27 per cent and its Patek Philippe index 47 per cent³. Bloomberg later reported that the index declined nearly 6 per cent in 2024, to its lowest level since 2021, after prices had "soared in 2020 and 2021 to unprecedented levels during the pandemic"⁴.

Morgan Stanley's figures, compiled with the data provider WatchCharts and reported by Time and Tide in February 2026, show secondary prices falling 10.7 per cent in 2023 and 6.1 per cent in 2024, before rising 4.9 per cent in 2025⁵. A recovery, then, but a partial one, and measured from a lower base.

The lesson is not that watches are a bad idea. It is that a price on a resale platform is a reading of mood as much as of merit. The watches did not change between 2021 and 2023. The money around them did. Indices of this kind also concentrate on the most traded references, so they say little about the quieter objects that make up most of what people actually own. Past movements, in either direction, are not a guide to future ones, and nothing in this article should be read as a suggestion that any object will hold or gain value.

What actually keeps an object alive

If speculation is a poor explanation, what does explain durability? Four things recur, and they are mostly practical.

The first is serviceability. A mechanical watch is designed to be opened, cleaned and adjusted, which is precisely what that Waltham salesman's sample advertised. Some makers turn this into a long commitment. Writing about the company's renovated service centre in Singapore, Tatler Asia reported in May 2026 that "Since 1839, Patek Philippe has promised to service every watch it has ever made"⁶. The same report notes that the centre at Wheelock Place, which reopened in January 2026, can repair watches made within the past 45 years locally, up to the complexity of a manual winding chronograph⁶. An object that can be repaired has a future. One that cannot is waiting to be replaced.

The second is documentation. Boxes, guarantee cards and service records do not make a watch better, but they shorten the distance between a buyer and the object's history. They are evidence, not proof: paperwork can be lost, and it can be forged.

The third is the brand's own hand in the market. In December 2022 Rolex launched its Certified Pre-Owned programme, initially through Bucherer boutiques in six European countries, with watches authenticated by Rolex and sold with a two-year international guarantee⁷⁸. The move can be read in two ways. It offers buyers reassurance. It also brings the second life of the object back under the control of the company that made it. Resale value, in this sense, is not only a property of the object. It is partly managed.

The fourth is scarcity combined with story, and here a single result is instructive. On 10 July 2025, Jane Birkin's original Hermès bag, made in 1984, sold at Sotheby's in Paris for 8.58 million euros including fees, a record for a handbag at auction⁹¹⁰. Agence France-Presse noted that its condition "reflects the many years of use" by its owner¹⁰. The bag was valuable because it was unique and had been carried, not because it was untouched. That is an exception, and an extreme one. It says very little about the price of any other bag, but a great deal about where meaning comes from.

The counterfeit in the room

Any market built on trust attracts people who exploit it. The OECD and the European Union Intellectual Property Office estimated in their 2025 report that trade in counterfeit goods was worth 467 billion US dollars in 2021, and that clothing, footwear and leather goods together accounted for 62 per cent of seized counterfeits¹¹. The BCG and Vestiaire Collective survey found that 70 per cent of respondents valued digital product passports for authentication when buying, yet 65 per cent had never heard of them¹.

The gap between those two numbers is telling. Buyers want certainty but rarely know where it comes from. Authentication is not a sticker. It is the slow work of someone who knows how a stitch should sit, how a movement should be finished and what a case number should correspond to.

Value that is not a number

Patek Philippe's best known advertising line, from its Generations campaign launched in autumn 1996, reads: "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation"¹³. It is, of course, marketing. It is also a reasonably accurate description of how durable objects work, and it applies far beyond one brand.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a small reticule, a drawstring bag of white cotton embroidered with white cotton thread, made by Martha Kittredge in New England in 1811¹⁴. It has no resale price. It survives because people kept it, cleaned it and passed it on. That is the other way an object holds value: not by being sold well, but by being looked after.

A useful question to ask of anything pre-owned, then, is not what it might be worth next year. It is whether it can still be repaired, whether its history can be traced, and whether its next owner will want to keep it. Those are questions about care rather than markets, and they tend to outlast the markets that ask them.

Sources

1. Resale's Next Chapter: How Fashion and Luxury Brands Can Win in the Secondhand Market (press release, 9 October 2025), Boston Consulting Group with Vestiaire Collective. https://www.bcg.com/press/9october2025-new-report-from-bcg-and-vestiaire-collective-reveals-global-trends-reshaping-the-resale-market (accessed 2026-10-24)
2. Swiss Watch Industry Study 2025 (press release, Zurich, 8 October 2025), Deloitte Switzerland. https://www.deloitte.com/ch/en/about/press-room/swiss-watch-industry-study-2025.html (accessed 2026-10-24)
3. Rolex, Patek Prices Hit Fresh Two-Year Lows: Subdial Index, Bloomberg, 14 November 2023 (as republished by Gulf News). https://gulfnews.com/business/retail/rolex-patek-prices-hit-fresh-two-year-lows-1.1699951073333 ; original: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/rolex-patek-prices-hit-fresh-two-year-lows-subdial-index (accessed 2026-10-24)
4. Rolex, Patek Used Watch Prices Fell to Three-Year Low in 2024, Bloomberg, 7 January 2025 (as republished by SWI swissinfo.ch). https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/rolex%2C-patek-used-watch-prices-fell-to-three-year-low-in-2024/88682883 (accessed 2026-10-24)
5. Andrew O'Connor, Morgan Stanley's latest data suggests a more stable secondary market. How is that beneficial to the watch community?, Time and Tide Watches, 4 February 2026. https://timeandtidewatches.com/morgan-stanleys-latest-data-suggests-a-more-stable-secondary-market-how-is-that-beneficial-to-the-watch-community/ (accessed 2026-10-24)
6. Annabel Tan, Patek Philippe's refreshed Singapore Service Centre, Tatler Asia, 12 May 2026. https://www.tatlerasia.com/style/watches/patek-philippe-newly-renovated-service-centre-singapore (accessed 2026-10-24)
7. Rolex Launches the Rolex Certified Pre-Owned Watch Program, aBlogtoWatch, 1 December 2022. https://ablogtowatch.com/rolex-launches-the-rolex-certified-pre-owned-watch-program (accessed 2026-10-24)
8. Rolex Certified Pre-Owned at Bucherer, Bucherer. https://bucherer.com/ch/en/about-us/news/rolex-certified-preowned-at-bucherer.html (accessed 2026-10-24)
9. World Record Hermès Birkin Sale: Jane Birkin's Original Birkin (2025), Sotheby's. https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/world-record-hermes-birkin-sale (accessed 2026-10-24)
10. The 10 million dollar bag: Original Birkin smashes records at Paris auction, AFP via FashionUnited, 10 July 2025. https://fashionunited.uk/news/fashion/the-10-million-dollar-bag-original-birkin-smashes-records-at-paris-auction/2025071082754 ; also eNCA (AFP): https://www.enca.com/lifestyle/10-mn-bag-original-birkin-smashes-records-paris-auction (accessed 2026-10-24)
11. Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025: Global Trends and Enforcement Challenges, OECD and EUIPO (reported by Global Finance, 1 July 2025). https://gfmag.com/economics-policy-regulation/fake-goods-trade-reaches-467-billion/ ; OECD press release: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2025/05/global-trade-in-fake-goods-reached-USD-467-billion-posing-risks-to-consumer-safety-and-compromising-intellectual-property.html (accessed 2026-10-24)
12. Pocket watch movement (AM 2004.51.45), Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pocket_watch_movement_(AM_2004.51.45-1).jpg (accessed 2026-10-24)
13. Patek Philippe celebrates the 20th anniversary of its "Generations" campaign and of the Patek Philippe Magazine (press release, December 2016), Patek Philippe. https://static.patek.com/pdf/pressreleases/ar/2016_PatekPhilippe_Campaign_and_Magazine_20th_Anniversary.pdf (accessed 2026-10-24)
14. Embroidered Reticule, Martha Kittredge, 1811, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 2005.272, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Embroidered_Reticule_MET_DP368765.jpg (accessed 2026-10-24)

Lead image: Pocket watch movement, Waltham Watch Company. Collection of Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, 2004.51.45, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.