Roman Sharf, founder of Gray Market and Luxury Bazaar, is ready to sell-up within the next five years, he tells WatchPro in this month’s Big American Interview.
In a wide-ranging conversation, which will be published online and with our November Stateside edition, he says his pre-owned watch business is generating annual sales of around $130 million and carries inventory valued in the region of $25 million.
Mr Sharf and his current team of around 30 has spent over two decades building a watch trading business.
For many years it was focused on the wholesale trade of new watches as a middleman between authorized dealers dumping unsold stock with secondary market traders, but now 90% of transactions are second hand watches bought and sold directly with the public.
The operation consists of the consumer-facing Luxury Bazaar, based in Southampton, Pennsylvania, which describes itself as an international pre-owned luxury watch dealer and the world’s leading luxury watch buyer.
It has a media arm that keeps customers updated with an online blog and social media under the Grey Market name.
Mr Sharf is the very public face of the business.
His Youtube videos are produced and promoted in his name, and have 414,000 subscribers and his most popular videos being viewed over one million times.
He believes the battle lines between primary and secondary watch markets have been all-but erased, with even Rolex and its authorised dealers entering the pre-owned market.
Mr Sharf would not say what price he puts on his business, but suggests the most likely buyer will be a major player from the mainstream primary market.
“You are going to see the bigger boys from the primary world, the big retailers, going after bigger, secondary dealers like ourselves,” he predicts.
“I see my company being owned by someone else, probably within the next three to five years and we want that to happen,” he adds. “The potential buyer is going to be either one of the groups or one of the big retailers,” he predicts.
