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The Watch World In 2025: Predictions, Expectations, And Hopes

Crystal ball, tell me all.

Jack Forster10 Min ReadJan 13 2025

The year just past has been a challenging one for the luxury industry in general and for fine watchmaking in particular, although that observation comes with the usual caveat that the watch industry is always going to have its share of ups and downs. With 2025 still only a few days old, though, it’s worth looking back to look forward and see what might be shaping up in the watch world for the months ahead – as well as what we might like to see as well; the two are not always the same thing.

I don’t think there’s any question that 2024 had some speed bumps; the Federation Of The Swiss Watch Industry’s report for January-November showed a major decline in some critical markets. One of the biggest drops was in China, where exports fell during that period by 26.3%, which is a pretty big fall-off no matter how you slice it. The United States by contrast showed definite growth – up 5.6% year over year, and Japan was up 9.7% year over year. For the watch industry these are figures that are hair-raising, although the overall decline for all markets was just 2.7%.

Now nobody in the industry likes being down year over year – especially not in markets as critical as China and Hong Kong – but the news is perhaps less dire than it seems and the overall appetite for fine watchmaking in all markets taken together is hardly any weaker this year than last. That said, industry leaders including Richemont’s Johann Rupert have gone on the record as saying that the industry is overproducing but while the FHH figures are a cautionary tale, they are hardly a symptom of an existential crisis.

Which brings us in due course to forecasts, hopes, and wishes for 2025.

Conservativism And Incrementalism

2024 with some major exceptions has been a quiet year, and I don’t expect the watch industry in general to diverge from caution in 2025; there is too much uncertainty in everything from politics to economics and there is a great deal of anxiety in the world in general, making capturing the attention of luxury clients (although perhaps not ultra-high luxury clients) at least as hard this year as last year.

Generally speaking, people buy luxury when they feel good and when they feel like celebrating and while there will still be reasons to feel both in 2025, this is not the kind of environment that makes impulsive, spur-of-the-moment acquisition more likely. Major innovations and initiatives are likely to be those which were put into motion two or more years ago – two of the biggest announcements of 2024, which came at Watches & Wonders at the beginning of the year, were the Vacheron Berkley Supercomp, and the IWC Eternal Calendar, both of which were the outcome of multi-year design and engineering efforts.

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One possible exception is Louis Vuitton watches – the brand has made significant strides in honing its collections in the last few years, and has both technical and financial resources to continue to do so this year. La Fabrique du Temps represents tremendous technical capabilities, already very much on display with LV’s complications including its automata, and it’ll be very interesting to see what it debuts (along with other LVMH watch brands) at the upcoming LVMH Watch Week in Los Angeles.

Stabilizing Prices In the Secondary And Pre-Owned Markets

It’s probably too much to say that there will be a renaissance of interest in pre-owned watches – the contraction year over year of Swiss watch exports (vide supra) will very likely make buying a new watch more attractive and more possible than it has been in years. At the same time, pre-owned for many desirable references will continue to offer, if not a major price advantage over primary market, at least greater ease of acquisition, and the motivation to hold off committing to a purchase in hopes of prices falling even further, is apt to be less strong as we move further into 2025.

Strong Voices Will Become Even More Important

The traditional media landscape is very much in flux, and the watch media landscape is no different. Over the years, the major players in online watch media have changed, from the first Usenet newsgroups, to a few dominant enthusiast forums including ThePuristS.com and Timezone.com, to major enthusiast websites. Today, however, watch media has become somewhat decentralized and a media brand is perhaps less important than strong individual voices, with strong individual perspectives and identities. While social media will very likely continue to be essential to modern online watch culture – with the caveat that uncertainty about the eventual fate of TikTok remains a concern, and that at this point, absence of credibility on social media is no longer a crisis but instead, business as usual – the next wave of watch media seems more and more likely to be centered around individual credible voices rather than platforms per se.

In particular, Substack has become a hotbed for self-published watch media, with an increasing percentage of real insight and analysis found there rather than on traditional platforms – these include blogs from writers as diverse as Kingflum, Jason Heaton, Tony Traina, and Chris Hall, all of which overdeliver on value for the subscription cost to put it mildly. Self-publishing isn’t immune to some of the basic issues in consumer journalism – in particular, the fact that watch journalism is access journalism – but at least the subscription model for now seems to encourage writers to prioritize reader rather than brand interests. Whether or not that model proves able to sustain itself over the long term, and in particular, whether or not it can resist the urge to at some point, achieve larger scale revenue, remains to be seen.

Independents: Scaling Up, Considering Legacies, And Competition From Major Brands

Independent watchmaking was never particularly easy – just ask some of its pioneers, including folks like Max Büsser, Ming Thein, or Benoît Minitiens, all of whom have had some hair-raising near-death experiences over the years (and they’re not the only ones). As such brands mature, of course, their founders begin to consider growth, how much of it to shoot for, and also to consider the legacies of their brands and their own personal legacies. Over the years various indies have adopted varied growth strategies and many have taken on investors to one degree or another and the brands which have the strongest combination of design and technical identities seem the most apt to be able to maintain a sense of that identity in their collectors in a market going through a lot of transitions, although to what extent you can sell yourself as an iconoclast outsider changes when you become an accepted part of the landscape, or even an institution.

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The other interesting question, and one which was raised by Rob Corder over at Watchpro, is to what extent larger brands and groups with extensive back catalogs can satisfy the market for vintage inspired designs, as well as high value contemporary watchmaking, which some independent brands at levels less ferociously costly than institutional independents like Rexhep Rexhepi, Philippe Dufour, or Journe. Corder points out that brands like Seiko and Citizen not only have deep back catalogs, they also have the technical ability and the benefits of economies of scale, to simply out-spend entry to mid-level indies, while offering reliability in terms of long-term service and support (at least in theory and often in practice). Bulova, which is owned by Citizen Group, is a perfect case in point – a substantial part of its catalogs are on-trend heritage models, like the Super Seville stone dial collabs with Complecto.

Emphasizing Watchmaking As Culture

One of the trends I hope to see is a greater emphasis on what watchmaking means in a larger cultural context. The tendency in watch media as in most consumer media is to emphasize new releases and recent trends – both of which are after all what a lot of us are interested in. However, an enlarged understanding of what watches mean as part of a longer and larger cultural history is critical to making a case for luxury watches in particular, and luxury in general. The luxury industry especially inasmuch as it has a tendency to show regular price increases, and as it faces questions about the integrity of its supply chains, would I think do well to remind its clients and for that matter, remind itself, of its contributions to culture as a whole, and to take visible pride in those contributions.

Watches are many things, including personal ornaments, expressions of personal taste, and yes, investments, but they touch just about every world imaginable including art and design, engineering, basic sciences, and even psychology and mythology. Marketing departments often feel compelled to create stories, which is after all their purpose in life; for 2025 I would wish for them, and all of us, to remember how many wonderful stories there are waiting to be discovered.

… And A Small Personal Rant About AI

I realize that the AI genie is never going back in the bottle, but I really, really, truly and sincerely wish we see less AI art in 2025. I don’t think bad AI art is necessarily going to stop anyone from reading an article, but aside from the fact that it’s lazy, and a form of plagiarism by proxy, generally unnecessary, and takes bread from the mouths of actual content creators (I invite you to imagine hollow-eyed hungry children of graphic artists clad in rags, staring through the window as the wind howls outside, especially this time of year) most AI images I have seen simply look awful. Often, they’re cluttered, with shrill colors, weirdly distorted faces and limbs, oddly plastic textures, no composition to speak of whatsoever, and are devoid of things like interesting management of light or depth of field. They are ugly, unimaginative, and on top of everything else, easy to spot almost instantly. In a world where trust in media is at an all time low, I think AI images have an adverse effect on reader engagement as well. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got sour grapes about not buying Nvidia three to five years ago either.

As someone said recently and pointedly, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” AI generated images are the equivalent of being told a watch is “hand finished” when it’s not; and if we love watches at least in part for what they represent in the human dimension I think we ought to reject AI images for the same reason.

This is not to say that AI can’t be a useful and powerful tool – I have found ChatGPT, for instance, to be an extremely valuable research tool and it’s given me some incredibly detailed and moreover, wonderfully clear and educational assistance with some occasionally very weird prompts. But when I read (for instance) a watch story, I want to know what the person who wrote it thought, and I want to see pictures that represent a series of educated and passionate – and human – choices.