Despite the Watch World’s Secrecy, Data Services Expand

Two decades after Fred Levin, one of the Swiss watch industry’s market research pioneers, introduced many watch businesses to the benefits of data, he is back with a new performance measurement service, Luxury Watch Barometer.

The business tracks point-of-sale data provided by more than 400 retail companies, with 2,100 store locations, across the United States, the Swiss watch industry’s largest export market for the past few years.

In exchange for providing information, Mr. Levin said, retailers receive the monthly reports free of charge. Brands pay an annual fee of $50,000 to $250,000 for the information.

“Participating retailers not only get the data — things like gross margin return on investment, inventory turns and sales growth — they also get the benchmark report so they can understand how they’re performing relative to the average,” he said.

The service, introduced in November, is one example of a new wave of number-crunching companies in the luxury watch business offering information from pricing and inventory trends to the ratio between sales and product allotments, called the sell-through rate. As a result, brands and store owners now may have access to more real-time market details than ever before.

The industry’s dearth of data stems from a deep-rooted tradition of discretion that has characterized the Swiss watch trade for centuries, said Oliver R. Müller, founder of LuxeConsult, a watch consultancy in Aubonne, Switzerland.

“The brands are not very keen to share their data,” Mr. Müller said. “Basically, the main source of data that everyone is using is export data from Swiss customs.”

He was referring to export statistics published monthly by the Fédération de l’Industrie Horlogère Suisse, a 42-year-old nonprofit association in Bienne, Switzerland, with approximately 500 members that produce and sell watches, clocks and components. The federation’s monthly reports break down the value and volume of exports across the Swiss industry’s top markets.

But, Mr. Müller noted, the numbers cover only sales to retailers, what the industry calls sell-in, rather than final sales to customers.

“Fanatic About Data”

In 2018, Thierry Huron, who also was troubled by the lack of sell-through data, began publishing the Sell-Out Index, a monthly report that documents retail watch and jewelry sales in key global markets such as the United States and China. He sells the information to brands, retailers and financial analysts.

“I’m a fanatic about data,” said Mr. Huron, a former TAG Heuer executive who also runs the Mercury Project, a watch and jewelry consultancy in Le Landeron, Switzerland. “When I left TAG Heuer, I started to collect info about sell-out in order to balance the official data coming from the federation.

“I collected data from official offices like the Census Bureau in the U.S. and I discovered that it was not rocket science,” he said. “You just have to dig into large databases.”

Mr. Müller can relate. Since 2018, LuxeConsult has partnered with Morgan Stanley to publish an annual Swiss watch industry report that ranks brands by sales and market share and provides key points about the state of the market.

But the rankings are estimates because a number of the industry’s leading brands are private companies that don’t release financial information, including the Big Four: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille.

A lengthy note in the report on its methodology said the estimates were “based on figures reported by public companies, public statements made by the C.E.O.s of watch brands over the years, direct discussions with watch brands, data from Fédération de l’Industrie Horlogère Suisse (FHS), and dialogue with industry contacts.”

Unlike the consumer goods, beverage or retail sectors, the note continued, there are no large consultancies publishing market share data on the Swiss watch sector. “This is due to the impracticality of conducting such surveys and the discreet nature of the Swiss watch industry,” it said.

Perhaps no brand is more discreet, nor influential, than Rolex, which continues to dominate the market. According to Morgan Stanley’s seventh annual report, released in February, Rolex’s share is said to have grown — to 30.3 percent — on the strength of its 2023 sales, estimated to have topped 10 billion Swiss francs.

Yet, because the company is said to forbid its authorized dealers from sharing point-of-sale data with third parties, Luxury Watch Barometer’s monthly reports don’t include the brand.

The Pre-Owned Sector

On the secondary market, where Rolex is equally dominant, EveryWatch, a new data-driven company, is helping shed light on what pre-owned watches are worth and where to buy them.

“EveryWatch was born from a need,” Giovanni Prigigallo, the business’s co-founder, said by phone from Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia, where he lives and works. “We created this service with the idea that there are aggregators in different fields like art, cars, wine, etc. But it was completely missing in the watch industry.”

The company publishes monthly reports with statistics about sales, aggregated by artificial intelligence from more than 300 auction houses and more than 180 marketplaces and dealers around the world. For example, the report released in February included details such as the total value of watches in the secondary market ($9.4 billion), the Cartier that drew the largest auction price that month (a Crash model, for $277,200) and the model that experienced the largest price increase compared with the previous month’s results (an Omega Seamaster, at more than 107.2 percent).

More Than Whispers

Mr. Levin’s role in the data field started in 2003, when he founded the Luxury Goods Intelligence Network (L.G.I.), a market research company that tracked retail sales of luxury watches across the United States.

“So many people would just throw stuff against the wall to see what stuck,” said Mr. Levin, who had spent five years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company and nine years with the Movado Group before going out on his own. “L.G.I. was the first time the industry had information that wasn’t just one brand leader whispering to another.”

Andrew Block, president and chief executive of the watch consultancy Second Time Partners in New York, echoed that comment.

The only data available before L.G.I. came along “was either from your own internal source or from the Swiss government, which only reported on Swiss exports and had nothing to do with actual sell-through,” Mr. Block, a former executive vice president at the retailer Tourneau, wrote in an email.

The NPD Group, a market research firm now known as Circana, acquired L.G.I. in 2010 and hired Mr. Levin to head its luxury division. He left in 2016 to become chief executive of Troverie, an e-commerce platform that sold timepieces offered by authorized retailers who were contractually prohibited from selling certain brands online.

But by 2020, price pressure from gray market dealers — the industry’s term for unauthorized sellers of genuine products — forced the website to shut down. Mr. Levin said requests from luxury watch brands and retailers were the catalyst for Luxury Watch Barometer. “Since NPD no longer provides any data on the luxury watch category,” he said, “we developed Luxury Watch Barometer to fill the information void for the industry.”

The increasing availability of such granular information about watch sales is a refreshing change from 20 years ago, he said, when L.G.I. was the lone provider.

At the time, “every other category had data — the watch category did not,” Mr. Levin said. “Today, we’re not a data desert, but maybe we’re a desert with a couple of oases.”