Signs of this trend were seen as early as April 2020 when men’s magazine GQ noted that Sotheby’s had been selling more classic watches, even as major brands called off their plans to release new models.
“In the market, there are watches for everybody,” Hiaeve said in an interview. “If you want to spend US$5,000, you’re going to find yourself a US$5,000 watch.
“The celebrities and the artists and all of them, they’re not wearing watches under US$100,000 any more – everything they want is over US$100,000. It’s really gone through the roof.”
Born in Israel, Hiaeve, 36, grew up in Queens, New York. At 16 years old, he opened Avi & Co, an exclusive high-end retailer that now caters to some of the notable names in the world: Foxx, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, to name only a few.
His family has always been in the jewellery business, he said, but the watch industry is where he truly found his calling.
“Jewellery was something my family was doing, so it was easier to learn it. But watches, this is something that came from a hobby,” Hiaeve said.
Luxury online resale market soars as wealthy buyers go on spending spree
“I used to love watches and play around with them. And you know what? I just felt like they were good investments. After a while, it became my main business.”
Most of Hiaeve’s clients come from word of mouth: basketball players, rappers and football players flock to him because they’re referred by existing customers.
In addition to the hype around owning a Rolex or Richard Mille, he said, most understand that many luxury watches hold good investment value, like a Birkin bag or Basquiat painting. These high-end, quality goods have historically proved to retain the value paid for them or even become more valuable over time, often significantly.
“A lot of people turn from a hobby to a business in the watch game,” Hiaeve said. “A lot of collectors that I know that used to buy from me, after a while they started buying for investments – buying, selling and trading.”
Though consultancy Bain reported in November 2020 that the luxury goods market had fallen 23 per cent to US$265 billion from 2019, very expensive items such as Hermès bags have long had a timeless quality, relatively untouched by financial discord and market downturns.
And people love Hermès as much as they ever have: when the brand reopened some stores in April last year after months of widespread closures, it brought in a whopping US$2.7 million in just one day at one of its stores in China alone.
Hiaeve said Richard Mille is the Hermès of watches. On the resale market, the brand’s watches consistently go up in value. Hiaeve said he’s seen some go from US$100,000 to US$120,000 in just a few months. Celebrity watch collectors clearly agree: Drake has one that costs at least US$750,000.
“[Richard Mille is] the most expensive,” Hiaeve says, before revealing that he once sold one for almost US$3 million. “It‘s not just the craftsmanship, it’s the supply and demand. They only make maybe four or five thousand watches a year. So you can’t really get them.”
Adam Golden, the owner of Menta Watches, told GQ last year that while his overall watch sales had declined, the pandemic brought new opportunities his way – like a German client who wanted to “park some money” in a US$300,000 portfolio of watches instead of in the stock market and requested Golden’s help putting that portfolio of “stable watches” together.
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit and destabilised global financial markets, the luxury sector was still recovering from the impact of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which saw Swiss watch imports to Hong Kong decline by 26.8 per cent in comparison to 2018. Facing the coronavirus pandemic, the luxury watch industry was preparing for its worst year yet.
In March 2020, Rolex shut down all of its Swiss factories, while Richemont, the luxury conglomerate that owns Cartier, had discounted second-hand pieces on its vintage resale site, Bloomberg reported at the time. Watch fairs throughout the world were called off, while smaller and newer brands braced for impact to their bottom lines.
That was then. Now, a so-called “K-shaped” recovery is taking hold as only the best-placed brands come out of the economic crunch largely unscathed, according to a February report by Bernstein, while others fare worse.
The Swatch Group, for example, owner of high-end brands including Blancpain, Breguet, Harry Winston and Omega, as well as fashion watches including Swatch and Calvin Klein, was slammed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic nosedive.
Meanwhile, brands with cachet such as Rolex were little affected. “Product innovation and the ability to establish and nurture product icons is vital – Rolex has done a fantastic job on this front,” Bernstein’s analyst Luca Solca said following the release of the February report.It goes back to the mantra mentioned before: pandemic or not, those who want to buy a Rolex, or an US$800,000 Patek Philippe, a US$2.2 million Richard Mille or a Salmon Dial Audemars Piguet Royal Oak for US$441,000, will always find a way to get one.
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