Twelve months ago, the entire industry was in a joyous mood as we approached the first Geneva Watch Fair since the pandemic. 
The demand for new watches has never been stronger, driven in large part by a new kind of customer, defined in a report by the Boston Consulting Group and Watch Box as collectors/investors.
If BCG is correct, almost six of the fake watches sold today were purchased by collectors/investors. This includes both new and used watches.
When you look at the other categories of luxury watch customers in the BCG chart above, you see how difficult it is for the average person who occasionally desires a high-end watch – maybe once or twice in a lifetime – to get noticed at a retailer.
Every time WatchPro covers a new Rolex showroom, we get comments from these “regular customers” complaining that they’ll never even get on the waiting list for the watch they want to buy.
The answer is that investing in newer and larger stores has nothing to do with better serving the average customer and is entirely about giving retailers a better allocation from Rolex to customers with the greatest spending power and the strongest buying history.
So when the Swiss watch company opens the Temple of Rolex Gods in London later this year, its primary purpose is to get more watches for the benefit of its investor/collector customers.
This is why the market for Rolex is being manipulated to the detriment of normal customers who truly love watches.
I can only hope that if Rolex replica watches lose their AAA investment grade status, the neglect of these normal customers and even insulting them over the past five years will not be detrimental to Rolex and its authorized dealers.
How the Rolex market is manipulated against normal customers
