Audemars Piguet is the latest watch industry heavyweight to start a proprietary secondary market program. The company will launch a certified pre-owned program by the end of this year. The news comes on the heels of Rolex’s surprising announcement of its certified pre-owned initiative in December 2022.
According to news broken over the weekend by Miss Tweed, a European publication by Astrid Wendlandt covering the luxury industry, Audemars Piguet CEO François-Henry Bennahmias announced the initiative at a luxury recruitment conference in Paris last week. Indeed, Robb Report spotted Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches at Material Good, an authorized dealer of pre-owned Audemars Piguet watches, at the Hôtel des Horlogers in Le Locle, Switzerland last week where he was staying while visiting the adjacent AP manufacture. It would seem that planning for the program is already fully underway.
And Audemars Piguet is apparently expecting the program to be a huge business—unsurprisingly, given the astronomical prices of its Royal Oak watches in the secondary market. “The CPO business is going to be bigger than the new business,” said Bennahmias at the conference, according to Miss Tweed. It will be good news for those with deep pockets who may have missed their opportunity to get a Royal Oak at retail. The timepieces have become notoriously difficult to purchase due to supply and demand issues. Bennahmias cited production constraints and insisted it was not a strategy for scarcity. The program will offer an authenticity guarantee so that buyers can feel safer with their purchase than they might buying from a gray market dealer. The test phase for the project is said to be coming at the end of 2023.
It’s not the watchmaker’s first foray into CPO dealing. It launched a program before the pandemic but put it on hold after it received some criticism for selling the same watch twice. But AP has also been working with Material Good for some time. In addition to selling authorized pre-owned AP watches, Material Good also operates boutiques for the company in East Hampton, Dallas and Boston. And it would appear that Material Good may be heavily involved in the new CPO program.
Business is, of course, already booming for Audemars Piguet. Revenue reached more than €2 billion (roughly $2.17 billion) in 2022. The debut of the new CPO program will coincide with Bennahmias’s departure; the executive is set to leave the company by the end of the year. By then he will have been at the company for a decade, where he oversaw renewed interest in the brand fueled by serious marketing, notably with high-profile celebrities including Kevin Hart, Serena Williams, LeBron James and Mark Ronson. He was also instrumental in tightening the reigns on distribution, pulling back from wholesale accounts in favor of selling directly through AP-operated boutiques. The CPO program will offer yet another layer of control over brand image and sales.
Audemars Piguet, Rolex and Patek Philippe are said to make up more than half of the total market for pre-owned watches, which begs the question: Will Patek be next?
