17 first look at a jewellery shopping experience as stores reopen
Beaverbrooks put safety first as it reopened its network of stores.

Watch sales in April were 10% higher than the same month in 2019

For the 12 months from May 2020 to April 2021, during which stores were closed for more than 20 weeks, sales increased by 4.6% over the prior year.

Watch sales lept by a third between March and April as jewellers and other non essential retailers reopened their doors.

GfK reports that the value of sales increased by 32.1% in a single month.

Comparisons to April last year are largely meaningless (up by 558% if you must know) because the country was in the hardest of lock downs and retailers had not had time to fire up clienteling and ecommerce.

A much more illuminating statistic is that the value of all watch sales in April 2021 was 10.1% higher than the same month two years ago.

The dashboard of data is beginning to flash green after a year of warning lights.

Sales for the first four months of 2021 are up 23% over the same period last year.

Remarkably, for the 12 months from May 2020 to April 2021, during which stores were closed for more than 20 weeks, sales increased by 4.6% over the prior year, which had only one month of the pandemic closures to deal with.

Watchpro barometer growth rates for apr 21

This month’s data once again shows how successfully British watch retailers have adapted to selling more expensive watches and, by contrast, how they have failed to get to grips with declining sales of cheaper timepieces.

It might have been expected that a rush towards online shopping would have benefited sales of sub-£500 watches, but the category is down by over 20% for the year to April while the value of watches sold for £5,000 to £10,000 rose by 7.2% and the over-£10,000 segment rose in value by 30.6%.

Overall, this feeds into a rise of 40.1% for the average price paid for a watch in a single year.

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