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How Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet are entering the secondhand market — and what it means for collectors, dealers, and the platforms that connect them.
For more than a century, luxury watch brands maintained a clean, bright line between their business and the secondhand market. They manufactured watches, distributed them through authorized retailers, and considered their obligation fulfilled the moment the warranty card was stamped. What happened to the watch after that — who sold it, for how much, and under what conditions — was someone else’s concern. The brands did not participate in resale. They did not acknowledge it. In many cases, they actively distanced themselves from it.
That era is over. In the span of three years, the most important names in watchmaking have reversed decades of institutional policy and entered the secondhand market directly. Rolex launched its Certified Pre-Owned program in December 2022. Vacheron Constantin followed in late 2024. Audemars Piguet is preparing its own CPO initiative for the near future. These are not tentative experiments. They are strategic commitments backed by infrastructure, personnel, and a clear-eyed recognition that the secondhand market has become too large, too profitable, and too consequential to the brand experience to ignore.
Why Now?
The catalyst is scale. The global secondhand luxury watch market reached approximately $45 - $50 billion in GMV in 2024, growing at roughly 6 - 7% per year — more than double the growth rate of primary retail. For the brands at the top of the market — Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet — secondhand transaction volumes for their watches now represent a meaningful share of total market activity. These are not niche numbers. They represent an economic ecosystem that the brands had no visibility into and no control over.
The Deloitte Swiss Watch Industry Study, surveying watch brand executives from 2023 through 2025, captured the magnitude of this shift. In 2023, 71% of executives said the secondhand market had a positive or very positive impact on their brand. By 2024, an even broader consensus had formed: the pre-owned channel was not a threat to be managed but an opportunity to be captured. What changed was not just sentiment but commercial reality. Brands watched as independent dealers, online marketplaces, and auction houses built multi-billion-dollar businesses on their products — capturing customer data, influencing pricing, and shaping the brand experience for secondhand buyers — all without the brands’ involvement or approval.
The concern was not merely financial. It was reputational. An unauthorized dealer selling a poorly serviced Rolex with replaced parts and no warranty creates a brand experience that Rolex has no control over. A buyer who purchases that watch and has a negative experience does not blame the dealer. They blame Rolex. As the secondhand market grew, so did the reputational exposure. The brands needed a way to participate — to certify quality, guarantee authenticity, and ensure that watches changing hands continued to uphold the standards that justified their prices.
Rolex: The First Mover
Rolex’s Certified Pre-Owned program launched in the fourth quarter of 2022, initially through Bucherer — the Swiss retail giant that Rolex would later acquire outright. The program allows authorized Rolex retailers to sell pre-owned Rolex watches that have been inspected, serviced, and certified by the brand. Each CPO watch receives the same quality checks as a newly purchased model, comes with a special CPO seal and guarantee card, and is backed by a new two-year international warranty. In May 2025, Rolex expanded eligibility from watches at least three years old to those at least two years old — a change that meaningfully broadened the addressable inventory.
The program’s growth has been extraordinary. From a standing start, Rolex CPO generated approximately $90 million in sales in 2023, $300 million in 2024, and over $500 million in 2025. By September 2025, more than one-sixth of Rolex’s global retail network was participating, with 100+ retailers across 200+ points of sale carrying approximately 8,500 CPO watches with a combined inventory value exceeding $200 million.
The pricing dynamics are instructive. Rolex CPO watches carry an average premium of roughly 30% above comparable models from non-certified dealers, with significant variation by retailer — Bucherer in Europe applies premiums averaging 40%, while U.S. retailers like The 1916 Company average closer to 15%. Rolex itself does not set prices; authorized dealers retain pricing discretion. But the premium exists because the market has demonstrated a willingness to pay for the brand’s direct endorsement. A Rolex CPO watch is, in the eyes of many buyers, categorically different from the same reference purchased from an independent dealer — even if the underlying watch is functionally identical.
Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour, speaking at Dubai Watch Week in November 2025, framed the program as a natural extension of the brand’s commitment to its products. He noted that in some retail locations, the second-largest “brand” by sales volume after Rolex new was Rolex pre-owned — business that was happening without any brand-backed guarantee. The CPO program was designed to ensure that when customers trade or buy a pre-owned Rolex through authorized channels, they receive the full Rolex experience and are fully protected.
Richemont: The Quiet Architect
While Rolex’s CPO program has captured the most headlines, the Richemont Group has arguably been building the most comprehensive secondhand strategy in the industry — and has been doing so for longer than anyone. Richemont’s acquisition of Watchfinder in 2018 was the first major signal that a luxury conglomerate saw the secondary market as a strategic priority rather than a nuisance. Watchfinder, founded in 2002, is one of the largest stock-based pre-owned watch dealers in the world, and its integration into Richemont gave the group an operational foothold in resale that no competitor could replicate overnight.
That infrastructure proved critical when Vacheron Constantin — Richemont’s flagship high-horology brand and a member of watchmaking’s “Holy Trinity” alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet — launched its own Certified Pre-Owned program in late 2024. The program was built in partnership with Watchfinder and operates globally across Vacheron Constantin boutiques, with plans to expand to additional retail partners and auction houses. Each CPO watch is inspected and serviced by Vacheron Constantin watchmakers, comes with a minimum two-year international warranty, and includes a blockchain-powered digital passport that provides transparent, tamper-proof information about the timepiece’s history and specifications.
Vacheron Constantin’s CPO initiative carries a distinctive advantage: the Maison has committed to restoring any watch produced since its founding in 1755 to its original state. This is not a marketing claim. It is a technical capability underwritten by an in-house restoration department with access to original components, archival blueprints, and nearly three centuries of production records. For collectors of vintage Vacheron, this is an extraordinary promise — one that transforms the CPO program from a simple resale channel into a custodial service for horological heritage.
Audemars Piguet: The Digital-First Approach
Audemars Piguet has taken the longest runway to launch its CPO program, but the ambition is commensurate. Former CEO François-Henry Bennahmias predicted that Audemars Piguet’s CPO business would eventually be larger than its new-watch business — a striking claim for a brand generating over €2 billion in annual revenue. Given that AP’s Royal Oak models trade at some of the highest premiums in the secondary market, the commercial logic is not difficult to see.
AP’s approach differs from its peers in important ways. The program is being developed as a digital-first initiative, launching online rather than through physical boutiques — a deliberate choice that reflects the buying habits of AP’s increasingly younger collector base. The program will encompass both modern and vintage timepieces, including pieces dating to before 1970, giving it a broader temporal scope than Rolex’s program. It is led by Marc Montagne, formerly head of digital marketing at Vacheron Constantin, whose appointment signals that AP views CPO as a technology and customer-experience challenge as much as a horological one.
What Brand CPO Means for the Market
The entry of major brands into the secondhand market carries significant implications for every other participant in the ecosystem.
For consumers, brand CPO programs offer a new tier of assurance. A Rolex-certified Submariner or a Vacheron-inspected Overseas carries the manufacturer’s direct endorsement — a level of trust that no independent dealer or marketplace can replicate, regardless of their own authentication capabilities. This is particularly valuable for first-time secondhand buyers who may lack the expertise to evaluate a watch independently and for whom the brand’s seal provides decisive peace of mind.
For independent dealers, the picture is more complex. Brand CPO programs represent a new competitor with an insurmountable structural advantage: the brand name itself. An independent dealer can offer identical authentication quality, faster turnaround, and better pricing, but they cannot stamp a watch with the manufacturer’s guarantee. The 30% average premium that Rolex CPO watches command over comparable non-certified models is, in economic terms, the price of that brand endorsement. Independent dealers must compete on every other dimension — selection, price, speed, and service — to justify their value proposition.
For online marketplaces, brand CPO is both a competitive challenge and a structural validation. The challenge is clear: brands are building their own resale channels, and to the extent that consumers gravitate toward brand-certified watches, marketplace transaction volumes may face pressure at the high end. But the validation is equally important. When Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet invest hundreds of millions of dollars in secondhand infrastructure, they are legitimizing the entire category. They are telling consumers that buying pre-owned is not a compromise — it is a sophisticated, brand-endorsed way to acquire a luxury watch. That message lifts the entire market, including the independent platforms that serve it.
The Limits of Brand CPO
For all their momentum, brand CPO programs face structural constraints that limit how much of the secondhand market they can ultimately capture. The comparison to automotive CPO is instructive: in the used car market, manufacturer-certified vehicles account for approximately 67% of total sales value at franchised dealerships. But in watches, the dynamics are different. Automotive CPO benefits from a natural trade-in cycle tied to new vehicle purchases; watches change hands through a far more fragmented and informal network of channels. Rolex CPO’s <10% share of its own secondary market, while impressive for a three-year-old program, suggests a long runway before brand-certified resale reaches comparable penetration.
There are also categories of secondhand demand that brand CPO is poorly positioned to serve. Vintage collectors who prize originality — untouched dials, original patina, unpolished cases — may actively avoid brand CPO, because the certification process involves full servicing and, in many cases, component replacement or refinishing that changes the character of the watch. Price-sensitive buyers, meanwhile, face a 25–40% premium for the CPO stamp that may be difficult to justify when reputable independent dealers offer comparable quality at lower prices with their own warranties. And for brands outside the top tier — Omega, Tudor, IWC, Breitling — whose watches trade below retail on the secondary market, the economics of a CPO program are less compelling, since there is no premium to capture.
Perhaps most importantly, brand CPO programs operate exclusively through authorized retail channels. They do not serve the collector who wants to sell a watch directly to another collector. They do not address the professional dealer who moves fifty watches a month and cannot afford the time or margin compression of routing everything through brand certification. And they do not reach the vast majority of secondary transactions, which happen online, between individuals, on platforms that offer convenience, speed, and competitive pricing. The market that brand CPO serves is real and growing, but it is a subset of a much larger ecosystem.
A Market with Room for Everyone
The entry of luxury watch brands into the secondhand market is the most consequential structural shift the industry has experienced in a generation. It validates the pre-owned category, raises quality standards, and gives consumers more confidence to participate. But it does not — and cannot — replace the independent marketplace ecosystem that serves the broader needs of buyers and sellers. Brand CPO captures the buyer who values the manufacturer’s seal above all else. Independent marketplaces serve everyone else: the seller who wants to keep 100% of the sale price, the buyer who wants the widest selection at the most competitive price, the collector chasing a discontinued reference that no brand CPO program stocks, and the community of enthusiasts for whom the secondary market is not just a place to transact but a place to discover.
The secondhand watch market is large enough, diverse enough, and growing fast enough to support both models. What matters for consumers is that they now have more options, more protections, and more transparency than at any point in the industry’s history. That is unambiguously good news — regardless of where the next watch you buy comes from.
Market data referenced in this article draws from Tempo internal research, the Deloitte 2023–2025 Swiss Watch Industry Studies, EveryWatch and WatchCharts Rolex CPO tracking data, Chrono24 H1 2025 Market Report, and publicly available brand press releases. Sales figures for the Rolex CPO program reflect estimates compiled by EveryWatch and WatchPro. All dollar figures are in USD unless otherwise noted.