Questions about starting a watch business that turned into a social experiment

Davidt

Rather than complaining that all the responses are negative or wrong why don’t you start with what you’ve already learnt and how you intend to continue?

Dan S

Clientele? You are a riot. 😁

cvalue13

You’ll have to forgive folks for having fatigue for the threads that go: “I want to flip watches, what should I know?”

That brand of question suggests a level of naïveté that’s difficult to respond to with patience if asked only once.

Asked repetitively, that brand of question drives one to drinking.

(PS: if you’re in the U.S., you should also look into the special flat tax rate that applies to the net proceeds from sales of watches - quite a hurdle to profits, that.)

Engee

I don't know anything about selling watches. All I know is when I come to offload any of the watches I've bought over the past 2-3 years since getting interested in the hobby, I'm going to almost certainly make a loss, no matter what Chrono24 tells me about the current value of part of my collection.

Something else I know, related, is that my dad was in the silver antiques business for many years. He told me the business is simple. You just have to know three things:

1) more than most (not all) of your competitors
2) where to buy the right things cheap
3) where to sell those things for a profit.

There's no way around the first condition. You need to have a good eye to spot interesting things, and you need to learn fast, because the slower you learn the more mistakes you make and every mistake costs money. As others have said about watches, you need cash and you need to turn it over quickly. So the idea of buying and wearing a watch for a while until you sell it makes no business sense at all. Business is all about buying and selling quickly. Inventory is a black hole that sucks money.

Dad's out of the business now, long retired, thankfully, because that business died for anyone hoping to make a serious living out of it more or less when eBay took off. The days of good stuff entering the trade at the bottom and spiralling their way up through dealers until they finally got spat out to the retail market are long gone.

Another thing I know, from studying for an MBA, is that any business needs either to be able to do the same as their competitors, but better, or to have a meaningful innovation of some kind. Very few businesses have a meaningful innovation which means you almost certainly need to be better than enough of the rest if you want to succeed. So that all comes back to eep knowledge.

I don't want to pee on your idea. I admire anyone who wants to start a business, and I don't blame you for coming here asking for advice. If you've been hanging around here without posting for a long time I'm sure you've learned a lot already, and probably from some of the world's most expert collectors, but even if you could bottle all that knowledge, are you ready to compete in what is probably in economic theory terms, a pretty perfect market?

immmhus

Interested in this kind of post fyi.

See when I started 7 odd years ago I started to make money and brought a whole bunch of different types of watches in my local area and on sold them on various auction like websites. I didn't do too bad with them and made a decent sum for relatively little work.

I brought the bad watches that had been redialed, I brought some less desirable watches that I ended up couldn't selling. Hell I've even got a watch that I have had from the start that still isn't getting sold but the adventure of the chase and the enjoyment it would bring is worth it to me.

Rn I would say I have had about 20-30 watches and probably am in the pluses. I haven't made a fortune but I have made a loss either and have had the chance to wear those watches around.

To me, you can't take your money with you so why park it in a garage or leave it in a watch box. That's why I wear them. Enjoy them you know.

The thing about the knowledge is key, yes I understand. I just brought a dirty dozen watch that has a changed crown, maybe to the purest that's a complete no no but the purest will only take up a certain amount of the percentage.

On and the thing about the competition, with anything in business you will have competitors, doesn't matter which line of work you go into. I'll be well aware of who's out there but there is probably only a handful in my country and selling will only come from reputation and honesty. Because what it seems like in this business, you word is bond.

Thanks for the reply BTW. 😀

immmhus

The thing about the knowledge is key, yes I understand. I just brought a dirty dozen watch that has a changed crown, maybe to the purest that's a complete no no but the purest will only take up a certain amount of the percentage.

immmhus

I'll be well aware of who's out there but there is probably only a handful in my country and selling will only come from reputation and honesty. Because what it seems like in this business, you word is bond.

Engee

My mistake - I thought from the original post that you had been dabbling for a short time, not for 7 years. I understand flipping and being a grey market trader are different things but I would have thought by now you would have accumulated more knowledge than most about trading watches.

Shabbaz

Selling vintage watches is not the problem. You can start a watch business with 2 things: 1) chrono24; and 2) a phone. The world is at your feet.

The problem I think is inventory and cash. You need to have serious cash to get the inventory and then you need to find dozens of (honest) watches in the world (that can be difficult as well!) which you can sell with a (small) profit. You have to have serious volume because chrono and taxes will take a part of the profit. Let say you sell 100 watches in a year. For every watch you have eur 200 profit. You pay 3k to chrono. So that's 17k a year before tax. But with 100 watches a year you have 100 potential problems a year. For 17k.

I would get a normal day job.