Today’s Luxury Watch Market Needs Fairly Priced Precious Metal Watches

There's nowhere near $22k in gold in a watch case, so what exactly is driving the pricing structure of precious metal watches? Is it tooling? Rarity? Exclusivity? Veblen effect? A combination of all these factors? Or perhaps the price is simply what the market will bear - enough people are willing to pay these "Insane" premiums, so that's where the watches are priced Lest I bury the lede, my take is that the luxury watch market is doing itself a disservice through illogical markups on precious metal watches Let's start by looking at the numbers and see what they reveal about markups on precious metal watches.

The steel versions of watches I included ranged from $2,200 to $11,800; I purposefully excluded brands like Patek Phillipe and Audemars Piaget, as a vast majority of their catalogs consist of precious metal watches, and pricing of high-end watches tends to be a whole different ballgame I only selected watches on straps because bracelet manufacturing and extra material costs are added complications that could bias the data; note also that, primarily for this reason, Rolex watches were excluded Now, let's look at the price of a gold watch in relation to the premium you're paying for the gold version.

What I get out of it is that watch brands aren't looking at each other - for that matter, they're not even looking at other models in their own lineups - when pricing their gold watches. . Source