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Wlcutter
·Interested in this kind of post fyi.
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.
Because you asked a series of questions, let's start there:
Have you made a living buying and selling watches? No, and the number of folks who have is extraordinarily small (like in the hundreds, and that's including dealers)
what sort of profit margins would you usually aim for? Depends on volume, original price, etc.
What's your initial investment in the watches? Again, depends on market.
Do you actually make any money on these or is all the profit made from social media or YouTube or fixing watches? You can make money on watches, certainly, it's the question of a) what watches and b) how much money.
Without some clear, identified idea of client and watch types, you're asking for heartache. Depending on what you're hawking, purists will take up *lots* of the oxygen. It's your decision: purists/collectors will pay more, and generally are more understanding (in my experience) of thorough explanations/stories (because they're more patient, and generally know watches better, imo). If you're just after profits, sure—flip whatever and find any buyer you can.
But that's the whole game: if you're selling good stuff you can stand behind, people will buy from you again. If you're flipping and just maximizing profits by cutting corners, your clients will know immediately, and you'll suffer mightily.
Is there a way to make some extra scratch flipping watches? Sure, maybe a couple grand/yr, if you're really dilligent, knowledgeable, and lucky. More than that, to get to a *career* doing it? With all due respect, the biggest failure most people have is a lack of awareness about how many people are already doing this. In the time I've been in watches (a decade), a whole upstart group of vintage-dealer/middle-men types has flourished. These are guys scrolling ebay/other auction sites every second, sniping mispriced watches, flipping them to dealers or offering them on online shops with better pictures+correct pricing. Competing with them is *very* resource intensive.
And past that, you're competing with really, really top-notch dealers (again, depending on clientele), who often have a huge number of incredibly loyal clients. Competing with them is *much* less of a simple, cavalier thing than you're acknowledging. Sure, every field's competitive. I, personally, am involved in a field with acceptance rates for work ranging from .1% to 3%. That's orders of magnitude easier than watches.
Plus, even if you identify your clients/market, and even if you find watches (which depends on you either stumbling on incredible watches which are underpriced, or finding some way to have a stream of such watches—if it's the latter, you don't need any of our help), the biggest bottleneck is service. Fixing watches gets harder by the year—either from supply-chain tightening re the manufactures, or from old parts getting less and less common+findable. Several fairly serious dealers I know are more protective of the names of their watchmakers than *any other detail* of their business. It's incredibly hard to find excellent watchmakers with capacity.
So: of course it's all possible. But not taking the competition incredibly seriously is (imo) a huge mistake, as is not having *lots* of ideas about clients and the price/types of watches you want to offer/become a master of. Of course, this is all just anecdata, to a degree, but (imo) you'd be real, real wise to listen to folks here. This isn't "some people on the internet." Any watch you've ever imagined seeing or owning has been had by someone here (I'm not bragging—I've got *nothing* on most folks here). There's no greater wealth of watch info online, imo, than here (and I say that as someone who spent maybe 6 yrs not posting at all because I realized how much I had to learn before I said anything.
Best of luck, sincerely.
