Patek Philippe

Recently on Instagram I wrote a series of posts concerning Patek and the grey market. I put them together to share here. Hope you all enjoy. Some find it easy to place blame on Patek regarding the Grey Market issue. Through my journey with Patek, I don’t ...  

Thank you for taking the time to share.

Thanks for your thoughtful, insightful, and honest post 😊

I was recently alerted to your IG posts, but since I don't have IG I confess I never got to read your thoughts before now. I'm sincerely glad you are posting them here, so let me very briefly chime in with my "stream of consciousness" as a reply to this t... 

Thank you for the kind words concerning my post. I deeply appreciate it. It has been nothing but joy in finding my feet on WPS! With your knowledge of Patek, it comes as no surprise to me that you have been mistaken as a mystery shopper haha!! If owned an... 

Agreed that it is not as simple as raising prices or production, one has to look at the big picture and all the moving parts.

Glad we agree. There is no easy answer here

Platinum and time only.

Thanks for posting and sharing brother 🙏🏼

As a proud owner of 5711 and 5712, please let me take a counter position here. First of all thank you for your well written and elaborate post, mine will be neither I fear. Just felt the need to comment on a couple of points where I disagree. My view as a... 

You do yourself a disservice - indeed it was well written and certainly thought provoking. Below I give my responses: As a customer: on this point we have no qualms. I agree with everything you’ve said and I hope my post was clear to show I do not believe... 

I really appreciate this thread and thank you for this, Horology_Ancienne! Your text is full of love for Patek and full of passion. The points you raised give food for thought and also open up some new perspectives. I'm currently quite tied to work, so ju... 

1) 100% Patek is a company which will have financial goals and act as most companies do in many ways. However, the reason why I fell in love with Patek is because they so often say to hell with traditional company objectives in order to be romantic. A gre... 

I completely agree and concur on all the points stated. There is one thing more that begs the question if Patek will embrace…that is the use of 21st century’s technology. I understand the core of Patek is tradition and following what has been done for yea... 

Further, applying digital ledger technology is different than authentication tech for physical goods and is a whole other discussion of challenges and really only works today with unique items and proprietary technology which again, proprietary tech rules... 

Authentication is the key in determining not only valuation across products but also provenance to safeguard any buyer of goods. Current paperwork can easily be duplicated and there is no ledger of which the public can access to authenticate. Imagine havi... 

Let's walk through your scenario. Say someone brings in a Patek watch to a dealer to resell. How does one identify the watch to validate it against this "ledger"? SN#? Those can be changed/duplicated. NFC chip? Those can be copied and coded at home. The o... 

I don't disagree with a word you've said, but you haven't come at this topic with a balanced approach. You've made your suggestions and mentioned all the "Pros" with your suggestion but haven't mentioned any of the "Cons." Those who've worked in the indus... 

I did cite a specific example to back up my words. Specifically I mentioned that there are no cons in the article and the article is written in a heavily biased manner. I may be the only person who thinks it's a heavily biased piece of text. And I may be ... 

And I'm afraid you were right. At the beginning I appreciated this thread very much and welcomed it, hoping and enjoying that we would have an open minded, interesting discussion. In reality, however, it is so far a one-sided „PR essay“, where supplementa... 

I appreciate the thoughts and the post from the perspective of a long time PP customer and I somewhat agree I guess my conclusion is different. It sounds like the conclusion of OPs thoughts are PP has done what they can within reason and so carry on, noth... 

You bring up a good point here. As for your thoughts on how to improve the grey market situation... I agree your approach could work. But how about this... Let's say I'm a big customer at an AD. This AD sells me a lot of watches that I want. But occasiona... 

„How can we change the attitude of those clients who are afraid to say No?“ IMHO: To achieve that you have to approach a different value system. Watches are not the most important things in the world. If I don't get something, it's not the end of the worl... 

But this is a common question I get from big collectors. They're afraid to say NO. And since financially, they're not losing much money by buying a watch they don't want anyways, they're happy to say yes to be able to stay the top client and to continue g... 

from their point of view. But at the end their “fear” and behavior encourage the seller. This vicious circle can only be broken if I can hold back sometimes and don't always have to have everything. But that is generally a basic problem in our time.

We live in a world of "Fear of Missing Out" culture.

I was careful not to give a final conclusion on the whole matter. As stated above (please see my response to Patrick for more details), this was written as a counter argument to popular points I’ve been hearing quite regularly. I mentioned this in my post... 

As far as loyalty, there's loyalty to AD's AND loyalty to end customers to consider. If a brand can do both, great, but when push comes to shove and ADs behave badly at the expense of the end customer, Patek has to choose. My point in outlining the differ... 

I hope we get some more opinions on how to solve this grey market problem. Ultimately, it's not a brand's job to police the industry (OP suggested this too, and I agree with the OP), and ultimately, the market decides what the price is. Unlike the stock m... 

You need to offer your “Cons” to the post in what you believe it’s wrong with the OP. Simply saying “you don't know what you don't know” gives the readers and OP nothing to go on. Offer what you think and we can judge otherwise. I am never stated my stanc... 

I was going to type up an even longer response, but I'm going to keep it short. For those who want to absorb every word of the original poster, go right ahead. For those who didn't realize this was a heavily biased post, but after reading my post realize ... 

Although extremely active and busy on Instagram which takes my time away from WPS , I have always been encouraged by our moderator GLau’s to share more on WPS, especially on important topics. Hence, I felt compelled to share this important matter with you... 

That's kind of the beauty about this site. One doesn't have to go into depth about their argument. They can state their prerogative as thoroughly or as shallowly as they desire. Of course, we would all like to see the reasoning behind an argument to make ... 

HA has some very valid points to make which may upset some members here, but the nature of the forum is such that various opposing views are always welcome and should be aired. I think it is difficult for Patrick in some circumstances to straddle the line... 

Just different strokes for different folks. On Instagram it's much more about consumer culture (not to mention Instagram, like Facebook, can be very show-off like) and on WatchProSite we're much more technical. We used to be even more technical, but writi... 

1. Claiming that the WPS is more than a “consumer culture” site, you must be kidding yourself. Look at the last 15-20 posts of the Patek forum. Do you see anything of substance, other than this post by HA? Why don’t you bring back the old glory of movemen... 

I already addressed your response in a previous post. I'm not bashing on the OP. I even agreed with the OP. You never even responded to my response where I called out your false accusation of me "dissing" anyone. Again, why would I disagree with the OP if... 

My humble opinion is as follows we will never be able to get rid of the gray market so long as people are willing to throw money at watches at any cost to show off or etc. And as long as people can make money, some people will capitalize on a relationship... 

Thank you for sharing your perspective here and on IG. All the very best, Niall

Scarcity of watches can happen for a number of reasons. Today even a Rolex is not as easy to get. I completely appreciate that scaling production to meet the demand of just 1 model is difficult and not in the best interest of many luxury watchmakers where... 

„Why not discontinue what clients don't want and not the most popular model!” Well, I'm just a small watch collector and work in a completely different segment (IT). So there are certainly more qualified people to explain the background to us. I deal with... 

like ultimately increasing the value of the company and -- a very good point -- make everything so desirable that as soon as a watch is available, even from refeences that are usually not loved like the Golden Ellipse, there is immediate demand. Additiona... 

What I know: the global amount of money is getting bigger and bigger and wants to be invested. And watches, like many other limited goods, are becoming more of an object of investment.

Thank you for sharing this with the community. I wholeheartedly agree with your excellent analysis of the situation.

I very much enjoyed your well thought out posts/arguments. The “extreme” answers are unlikely to be the right ones.

some brands are abandoning their faithful dealers and going the way of the boutique. Very sad.

I have no complaints about your synopsis. But, what about those of us who happen to have obtained a nautilus watch prior to the upsurge in pricing? Many years ago, I was eyeing the nautilus chronograph. It didn’t come to fruition. But, my wife bought me t... 

It seems many of the comments about suffering an increase in production of sports watches or increasing price to meet market price and eliminating ADs are comments from those who are not familiar with Patak and it's history. AP is known to eliminate ADs i... 

Knowing that you are extremely busy on IG, I thank you sincerely on behalf of the forum for sharing your passion, knowledge and collection. Great that you explained out the history of AD partnerships which is an important point that defines the philosophy... 

Thanks for reposting this. I enjoyed reading the original post on IG. Your input is always well thought out and appreciated.

at some point most PP watches will come on the market at some point in time. Owners need to downsize or die with no heirs and the watches turn up at dealers or auctions. It is a laudable goal to attempt to sell new product to true end users, but with the ...