E-commerce for luxury watches: Interview with Chrono24 founder

Portals for used luxury watches have a reputation as gray market portals where dealers try to sell their goods that they cannot get rid of through traditional trade. Trading platforms had to take a lot of criticism for this. Has she gone silent?
I think brands have realized very well that the gray market problem is not Chrono24’s, we are just the mirror of that market. We don’t decide whether to put too many watches on the market or not. The brands decide that. When they suggest jewelers to buy certain models in order to get others, then these watches appear in the market. However, we very much welcome the fact that many brands are very consistent and want to limit the gray market because this increases demand. You can see very clearly that the three big brands that do this best – Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet – are the very brands with the best historical price history. That speaks volumes. Customers don’t want to buy the watches that you can get cheaply, customers want to buy the watches that aren’t so easy to get. The big family-run brands in particular are also in high demand at Chrono24, and the gray market for these brands is now such that you have to pay substantially higher prices for a watch on the marketplaces than it would cost in the shop.