Weekend Watch Lists – Top 10 Mechanical Watches Between 2000 And 3000 Euro

It’s weekend! We decided to come up with some easy-to-digest content for the weekend, as you’ve probably been doing enough reading all week. From now on, we will publish our Weekend Watch Lists feature every weekend, to show you overviews with information about the consumer watch market. Our overviews are based on data from on-line watch consumers. Per list we will indicate the countries from which we used the data, as this will vary to keep it interesting. It will be interesting to see how much taste in watches can differ per country and continent. Data is retrieved from Chronolytics.ch, watch market research company that operates under the flag of Ebner Verlag (publishing house of magazines like WatchTime, Uhren Magazine, Chronos etc.).

Being a well-read publication on watches, we receive an awful lot of e-mail from our readers asking to help them to find a watch. In most cases, they exactly know what they are looking for but just can’t manage to find the right timepiece. In other cases, people have a budget in mind but didn’t decide on a specific brand or model yet. We can imagine this is tough, as there are so many brands and models to choose from. We collected the most recent bunch of requests that we received and concluded that most of them are about helping to find a watch between 2000 and 3000 Euro.

We asked Chronolytics to do some data mining and see what the most popular watch brands and models are between 2000 Euro and 3000 Euro that come with a mechanical movement (either self-winding or hand-wound). We asked them to include both new as well as pre-owned watches. Numbers are based on watch consumers’ demand in Q1 2015 in the United States as well as Europe.

Top 10 Mechanical Watches – Brands

As you can see above, we first give you the Top 10 Mechanical Watches brands and their share-of-voice in the European and US markets. As said before, it is based on all watches, including new and pre-owned. It is interesting to see that NOMOS made it into the US market and not in the European market. Instead, we see Zenith in this price range in the European market. Tudor has gained a high ranking in both Top 10 Mechanical Watches brand overviews, whereas the brand wouldn’t even get a mention in the Top 10 a few years ago. Brands that are normally in the higher priced regions, like Rolex, Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC and so on, are in this list because of their pre-owned watches. Omega is the absolute number 1 in both overviews, although this brand has only a few watches (De Ville Prestige) that are priced below 3000 Euro (new watches). However, looking at pre-owned watches, there are a lot of models you can purchase for this budget from this famous brand from Biel, Switzerland.

Top 10 Mechanical Watches – Models

We asked to collect the models by family, as otherwise we would have seen a lot of different Seamaster models (Aqua Terra, Planet Ocean, 300M and some vintage references) in the Top 10. The same goes for all the other models in this list, they have been aggregated to model family. It is very interesting to see that up to position 5 in the overviews, the models are the same for Europe and the United States. Tudor performs slightly better in the US with their Black Bay models, but we’ve also seen that Tudor has a higher share-of-voice in the US than it has in Europe. They had a huge campaign that started in 2013 already whereas in Europe we had to wait a bit longer (or there wasn’t a campaign at all).

Furthermore, it seems that the US watch consumer has a slight preference for the Breitling SuperOcean models and in Europe the Chronomat performed a bit better. IWC is doing well with their Pilot models in this price range. We found the Carrera by TAG Heuer coming a bit as a surprise on this position, as we didn’t expect the demand to be that high. For now, we included both new and pre-owned models but it would be interesting to see how new and pre-owned (TAG) Heuer models perform amongst on-line consumers. Especially since their change of strategy, starting last year.