For the past 20 years, Watchfinder has bought and owned every watch it has sold.
Each piece has been brought into its workshop, checked, serviced and refurbished, if necessary, before being professionally photographed and put on sale through its website or growing network of stores.
That is changing on April 12 with the launch of a marketplace where a carefully curated group of third party sellers will start listing their watches alongside the inventory owned by Watchfinder.
This is a significant step into a competitive part of the secondary market, with the likes of eBay and Chrono24 already well-established. But Watchfinder CEO Arjen van de Vall is confident his business will offer a different, significantly elevated, experience.
“We recognise that there are other marketplaces [for luxury watches] already, but we have developed ours with a focus on the quality of our inventory and the quality of our service. We are working with the industry, with selected sellers, to refine the proposition and customise it to what they want to see from a new marketplace,” he tells WatchPro.
“We have worked together very collaboratively with third party sellers to come up with a proposition that we all believe will work. It is not a quantity game, where we are not looking to add as many sellers as possible. It is a curated solution that ensures that the marketplace gets as close as possible to delivering the same quality level of products and service as when we are selling our own inventory,” he adds.
Watchfinder’s marketplace is launching first in the UK, but the Richemont-owned company is a global operation, and is promising to expand the offering to the United States and Europe soon.
For customers, they will get a fully blended experience with inventory owned by Watchfinder and watches consigned to the marketplace by third party sellers alongside each other. The buying process will be the same, all the way through to checkout and tracking deliveries.
This has made it crucial that sellers for the quality of their service and inventory because Watchfinder wants the experience from a customer perspective to be similar, regardless of who is offering the watches.
A small difference is that there will be a stamp with a marketplace watch and a description of who the seller is. “We are fully transparent and do everything to make sure the client experience is to the same high standard,” Mr van de Vall promises.
