After the pandemic lockdowns, the Swiss watch industry did what every other luxury racket did when the world reopened and money was still cheaper than common sense. It got roaring, roaring high.
Exports went vertical. Waiting lists stretched longer than a congressional ethics investigation. Secondary-market prices for steel sports watches shot up like a congressman’s blood pressure at a free lunch. Social media turned every new Submariner allocation into a religious experience, complete with trembling hands and testimonials. Brands that had spent decades insisting their steel watches were rarer than honest politicians suddenly started cranking them out like Detroit in 1955. For a brief, glorious moment, it looked like the good times would never end.
They ended. Of course they ended. Good times always end—especially when they’re built on the economic principle known as “Let’s pretend this thing is scarce while we make a whole lot more of it.”
The Sugar High That Nearly Broke the Industry
Between 2021 and 2023 the Swiss watch industry posted record after record. Easy money, stimulus checks, remote-work windfalls, and a global status arms race created the perfect conditions for a luxury binge. Steel Rolexes, Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks, and Patek Nautiluses became the new Bitcoin for people who still preferred objects they could actually hold—and flex in the comments section.
The industry responded the only way industries ever respond when demand turns irrational: it made more product. Factories ran harder. Steel cases and bracelets that once felt scarce started shipping in volumes that would have made a 1970s Detroit auto executive blush. The scarcity, it turned out, was never permanent. It was theater. Very expensive theater.
Scarcity Theater and the Allocation Racket
Nothing sells better than the feeling that you almost can’t have it. Brands and authorized dealers perfected the performance. Waiting lists. Mysterious allocation systems that operated with all the transparency of a Vatican conclave. Influencers unboxing the latest delivery like they’d just received the Holy Grail and a Rolex in the same package. The message was clear: This is rare. This is special. This is an investment. Buy now or cry later.
Then the easy money dried up. Interest rates rose. Chinese demand cooled. American consumers looked at their credit card statements and experienced a sudden, unpleasant attack of arithmetic. And the same steel boxes that had been treated like sacred relics started showing up on the secondary market in numbers that made the exclusivity look about as durable as a politician’s campaign promise.
You can only sell so many “exclusive” steel boxes before the exclusivity wears off like a bad plating job.
The Hangover Hits in Hard Numbers
By 2025 the numbers finally told the story the marketing departments had been hoping nobody would notice. Swiss watch exports fell 1.7 percent in value to roughly 25.6 billion Swiss francs. Units dropped harder—4.8 percent, to about 14.6 million watches. For the first time since the post-COVID recovery, employment in the Swiss watch industry actually declined. Roughly 835 jobs disappeared, a 1.3 percent drop.
The industry had discovered the oldest lesson in economics: supply eventually responds to high prices. When enough “rare” steel watches leave the factory, they stop being rare. Shocking, I know.
Musical Chairs on the Secondary Market
Look past the icons and the picture gets clearer—and less flattering. Plenty of perfectly respectable non-icon models from perfectly respectable brands started softening. Prices that once marched steadily upward began to stall or reverse. Only the deepest cultural hits, certain Patek references and a handful of Rolex sports models, continued to hold or gain ground. Everything else quietly digested a surplus of inventory like a man who ordered the tasting menu and is now regretting the third dessert course.
This is the musical chairs of the watch market. The music plays, the premiums spin around the room, and everyone scrambles for the hot seat—Rolex sports models one year, Audemars Piguet the next, some obscure independent the year after that. Then the music stops. Suddenly the chair you fought for is just another steel box, and the guy who sold it to you is already across the room eyeing the next round. Premiums come and go. Brands heat up and cool off. What was “an investment” last season is this season’s mildly embarrassing wrist furniture.
47th Street Knows the Game—Most Buyers Don’t
This is not the stock market. This is the watch marketplace, where the dealers on New York’s 47th Street are the true masters of the arbitrage. They know the spreads, they know the cycles, and they know exactly when to pass the hot potato. Consumers, meanwhile, are often left holding the bag—sometimes a very expensive bag with a nice bracelet and a dial that no longer commands a premium.
Hype cycles are not permanent moats. Manufactured scarcity works beautifully right up until the manufacturer decides the margins from higher volume look better than the margins from pretending the product is scarce. Social media can amplify desire to opera-house levels, but it cannot repeal the laws of supply and demand forever. Not even with the best hashtags.
The Only Sane Advice Left
The post-COVID boom was real. The subsequent cooling is also real. Anyone still treating a current-production steel sports watch as a reliable long-term investment is operating on the old script—the one written during the sugar high, when everyone was still high and the hangover hadn’t started yet.
Invest in the stock market. Do not invest in the hope that the steel box on your wrist will be a retirement vehicle. That’s a sucker’s play.
The industry learned the hard way that exclusivity has a shelf life. The only question left is how many buyers learned the same lesson before the music starts up again—and how many will still be scrambling for chairs when it stops.
