IWC joins the vintage revival, restoring and reselling archival watches

The high-end watch industry has long taken a slightly sniffy attitude to the pre-owned watch market, rightly seeing it as a rival for sales, but also for its establishing a more dynamic (for which read often more realistic) valuation model. For a long time it has seemed that never the twain shall meet. But now another step has been taken to bridging the gap: IWC has launched IWC Curated, with various of the Swiss maker’s shops around the world set to offer a selection of vintage IWC pieces, each inspected, restored, serviced and given a new warranty by the company pre-sale.

'The vintage watch market is huge now, but we wanted to find a point of difference [before entering it], in terms of the watches we could offer and ones that also fit into the stories of the new watches we may one launching,' says David Seyffer, IWC’s head of archive. Through selling via its shops, IWC aims to underscore the availability of after-sales support not commonly found in the largely online vintage watch market and to offer the same experience as buying new.

The watches will be sourced through private owners and collectors and authenticated against IWC’s production records. Pricing, Seyffer says, won’t be 'commercial' - that is, akin to that applied to new watches - but will 'be fair to the investment' put into their restoration.

'A lot of people approach us with watches [for sale] and if those pieces are not right for the IWC museum - and what goes in there stays in there - then maybe they can work for Curated,' explains Seyffer. Most of these watches will be sourced in Switzerland - 'there may, for example, be friends or relatives of people who used to work for the company, who were given an IWC watch and then forgot about it' he suggests - and selected according to rarity, condition and an assessment of possible restoration, if required. 'It would have been great to have had a [load of] deadstock watches somewhere at IWC - but unfortunately not,' he laughs.

Seyffer adds that while the watch industry has certainly pursued a vintage aesthetic over recent years - ‘heritage’ designs and ‘re-issues’ being a dominant trend - there’s a customer seeking the 'emotional value' in the genuinely vintage but who also wants restoration to a standard perhaps only feasible by the original manufacturer. IWC is not alone in this: Vacheron Constantin and Rolex also offer sales of their pre-owned watches, with Cartier running a part-exchange service.

'I think the conclusion was that IWC may as well be part of this vintage market but in a dedicated, exclusive way and not a huge scale,' says Seyffer. Curated will offer a rolling stock of tens of pieces, not more. 'This is, in a way, a process of heritage management for IWC,' he says.

'The big watch brands are finally waking up to vintage, less as a money-spinner and more as a means of underscoring their prestige,' argues David Silver, director of London-based pre-owned Rolex specialist The Vintage Watch Company. 'Most have gone through their archives in terms of design and there’s a growing interest in their histories - so addressing the vintage watch market themselves is a way of putting the spotlight on those.'

But, Silver adds, it’s precisely the inability of customers to buy certain new models from some brands - either because production can’t keep pace or because distribution is deliberately limited - that has in part driven more watch fans into the vintage market in the first place.

iwc.com