The serious trade in serious watches is, contrary to the impression a reader might form from the trade press, conducted in the main outside the auction houses. I write this from a position of some familiarity with the auction houses themselves, in which I spent the larger part of my professional life, and in some sympathy with the colleagues who continue to do excellent work in them. The observation is not a criticism. It is a description of how the trade has, in fact, been organised for as long as the trade has existed.
The auction system, by which the public estimate of a watch is, in the popular imagination, supposed to be set, is a system that handles a small fraction of the year's serious transactions in the metal. The fraction is increasing in some categories and declining in others. The serious transactions — by which I mean the transactions in pieces of historical significance, in pieces with documented provenance to a notable owner, in pieces of which only a small number were produced — are conducted, in the great majority of cases, privately, between principals who have known each other, in many cases, for the better part of their careers.
The reasons for this are not mysterious. The auction system serves certain interests — the consignor seeking the broadest possible market, the institution seeking to test a price publicly, the estate seeking to dispose of a holding promptly — and it serves them well. It serves other interests less well. The owner who wishes to dispose of a serious piece without it appearing in a catalogue, the buyer who wishes to acquire a serious piece without competing for it in public, the dealer who wishes to place a piece with a particular collector for whom it is, in his view, the right object — all of these are served better by the older private channels than by the public one.
The Maison's acquisitions office is in the older private channel by inheritance. The relationships through which our work is conducted have been maintained, in some cases, for decades, and they include relationships with the small group of dealers across Geneva, Zurich, London, Paris, and a few other places who handle the kind of pieces our members are most often interested in. The relationships are, by design, private. The dealers in question do not maintain showrooms in the conventional sense. They do not advertise. The names of their clients are, with rare exceptions, not disclosed even within the trade.
The work the Maison conducts in this channel proceeds at a different pace and on a different basis from the work the same kinds of pieces would attract in the public market. A piece may be discussed, between dealers and the Maison, for several months before any commercial conversation is opened. The discussion concerns the piece's history, its present condition, the considerations that bear on its appropriate price, and — importantly — the question of whether the piece is, in fact, the right one for any particular collector at any particular time. It is not unusual for the conclusion to be that the piece is not the right one, and for the matter to be left there. The dealer is not offended. The piece will, in due course, find a different home.
The pricing in the private channel deserves a separate observation. The popular view — encouraged, perhaps, by the press attention given to record-setting auction results — is that the private market trades at a discount to the public one, on the theory that the seller forgoes the broader audience of the auction in exchange for the privacy. The view is not quite correct. In many categories the private market trades at a premium to the auction estimates, for reasons that are obvious on reflection: the buyer in the private channel is, very often, a buyer for whom the piece has been specifically identified, and whose interest in not competing publicly is itself a thing for which he is willing to pay. The seller in the private channel, correspondingly, is a seller who values the discretion, the timing, and the absence of fees in a way the auction channel cannot match.
The Maison advises members on both sides of this calculation. We will, on a member's behalf, identify a piece in the private market and advise on its acquisition. We will, equally, on a member's behalf, dispose of a piece into the private market when the circumstances suggest that the public route would not serve the member's interests. The decisions are taken on the merits of the particular case and with the particular member's particular long-term interests in view. The Maison's compensation does not vary according to which decision is reached, and we are at some pains to ensure that members understand this.
I will close with the observation, perhaps obvious, that the older trade in serious watches is, like much else the Maison concerns itself with, sustained by relationships rather than by market mechanisms. The relationships have been built over time, by people whose names will not appear in any catalogue, on the basis of trust that has had to be earned and that cannot, once lost, easily be re-established. The Maison's role, in the trade as in the other practices it conducts, is to extend the benefit of those relationships to the members whose interests we have been trusted to represent.
— Tomás Reinhardt, August 2025