Fratello Talks: Watch Brands Increasing Their Prices In 2023
The Omega Speedmaster Professional will be priced at €7,500 as of February 1st (it was €7,100). The Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Duoface? It is now €13,100 instead of €9,100 not even a year ago. That’s a price increase of nearly 44%. It almost sounds like Rolex is keeping it sane for its sports models with increases of approximately 2%. The catch here is that you can’t buy them anyway. Nacho, Lex, and RJ talk about the price increases of watch brands in 2023.
Wrist check
As always, we start with a quick wrist check during the podcast recording. Lex is wearing his Grand Seiko SBGX341 on a tropic rubber strap, RJ is wearing his 1996 Rolex Sea-Dweller 16600, and Nacho is showing off with his latest purchase, the Omega Seamaster 300M 2254.50. But we don’t talk much about these watches. Instead, we cut right to the chase and talk about the price increases that brands are slapping us with. They range from below 2% to a whopping 43.9% (you read that correctly).
Watch brands increased their prices
Last week, we reported about the increasing prices of watches. Some brands are planning to increase them, like Omega and Grand Seiko (approximately 5%), and others, like Rolex and Tudor, already did so. The brand we did not mention last time but that was brought to our attention is Jaeger-LeCoultre. Compared to the prices of last April (2022), they simply skyrocketed. For example, the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Duoface that our colleague Daan bought last year for €9,100 now has a price tag of €13,100. That is an increase of approximately 44%.
A pre-owned Jaeger LeCoultre Grande Reverso 976 from 2017 for sale at €9,990.
Is that a correction on a price that was simply too low in the past (we could debate that), or is the demand so high for JLC models that the brand can pull it off (we can also debate that)? A quick search of the pre-owned and gray market shows that there’s quite a disconnect between those prices and the new retail prices. A pre-owned full-gold Reverso can be found for less than the price of a new steel Reverso Monoface. We will keep an eye on the pre-owned prices to see if they will increase accordingly as well. In this podcast, we discuss the watches that have been subject to price increases, especially those from Jaeger-LeCoultre.
Enjoy!
