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Percentage Breakdown of TD Sales by Watch Brand

dogwood

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TL;DR: Almost 60% of rep sales are Rolex...

I was curious about what the breakdown of TD sales are by brand. This info obvious translates back upstream to factories, and would give me an idea about why factories focus on certain brands / models more than others. Obviously TDs would have this sort of data, but I didn't think it would be polite to ask. But, MiroTime uses a photo sharing site for his QC posts, and it's possible to click back from any QC album to see the entire index of QC albums. So then all I had to do was scroll through the index of QC albums and identify the watch in each album, and record that in a spreadsheet. There are over 1500 QC albums, but I stopped just after 550. I figured that would be a reasonable subset of the data to work with. PM me if you'd like access to the raw data.

Here are the results: It's no surprise the Rolex dominates... the un-labed wedges at the top are Breitling and Hublot (with <1% each)

And for the breakdown of which Rolex models are sell the most / least, I went a step further and broke things down by model. The three un-labeled wedges at the top at the Milgause, Sky-Dweller, and Air-King with <0.3% each... I wasn't surprised that the Sub was at the top of the list, but I was a little surprised that the Daytona wasn't higher. Initially I thought this might be a sampling bias since Daytonas have only recently come back onto the market. But, I checked and all the QC albums that I used for my dataset we from Jan 2022 onwards, so there were Clean Factory Daytonas available for purchase during this entire period (obviously just the 4 most popular models, but I don't think this introduces too much of a bias to the data).



I guess this is a bit of a nail in the coffin of my dreams of an Explorer II with a good quality movement... not gonna happen, there's just no market for it.

Anyway, that was my afternoon project. Let me know if you have any other sales data related questions or thoughts.
 

dogwood

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Another surprising thing is the lack of super clone movements for Omega. We have a super clones for Rolex (VS3235, VS3135, N4130, VR3186, etc), AP (3KF’s 3120), and Patek Philippe (3KF’s 324)… but nothing for Omega which is number 2 for sales. You’d think it would be worth the investment in developing a movement to produce a good speedmaster or seamaster.

I wonder if clone movements make tte watches sell better. They probably do with RWI members, but we’re a rounding error worth of sales compared to the in-person replica trade within China. We can only hope factories see the profit in releasing omega clone movements.
 

p0pperini

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What an interesting bit of analysis. Nice one dogwood - thanks for taking the time to do this.
 

JayBee0815

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Thanks dogwood , great work! The high share of Rolex is not surprising ... to be honest, I expected an even higher share. Of course, this raises the question of a sampling bias. Is MiroTime representative? Is the time period studied representative? The big GMT hype was last year. So it is at least understandable that the market has cooled down in the meantime. The low Daytona share also surprises me ... ok, that may have something to do with the very high price.

What strikes me in particular: The Panerai share of 1.8% is much lower than I would have suspected. There were no good new models in the period under review, but at least there were some VSF stock promotions. Also at MiroTime? I also attribute the fact that Vacheron Constantin is even higher than Panerai to the sampling bias. And Cartier as the third most popular Rep brand? That's also very surprising.

If these numbers are representative, that's a very bad signal. We don't need to be surprised that no good new Panerai Reps come onto the market and that instead, almost every day, an irrelevant mee-too variant of some Rolex is released. Sad.
 

mech500

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Wow. This is interesting. Good piece of work.

Who’s mirotime tho?


Sent from my iPhone using RWI
 

JayBee0815

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but nothing for Omega which is number 2 for sales. You’d think it would be worth the investment in developing a movement to produce a good speedmaster or seamaster.

That is easy to answer. The modern Omega-Movements are Co-Axial. There is afaik no asian Base-Movement, that is Co-Axial. So the development of a "real" Clone or even Super-Clone would be very hard and expensive. But who needs a Super-Clone-Movement? Why they dont take a proper Seagull-Movement and make some models with closed caseback?
 
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mech500

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Wow. This is interesting. Good piece of work.

Who’s mirotime tho?


Sent from my iPhone using RWI
 

Plaasbaas

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Thanks, this is really interesting. Thank you for your time and effort.

Even if there might be a slight bias here and there, it will not be off by far.
If one could and would repeat this with other Dealers and/or other time periods
the results will surely be similar.

If I like or not - this is what the market demands, and demand induces supply.

And what is the most frequently asked newbie question? It's "who has the best sub".
Everything else is a niche product, unless Omega and Swatch join forces lol.
 
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KOT1917

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Thanks for sharing.

I think this statistic is heavily influenced by the representation of some factories during this period, and therefore Panerai's 1.8%, I think, is primarily due to the fact that TTF and HWF simply did not deserve more interest. At the same time, in addition to the low share of Daytona (Although, as I understand it, the NOOB favorite was hardly sold then), the low share of AP is also surprising. And what's also news to me is that there's not even a Breitling...
 

flashu

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Great work! Thank you for the time you took for sharing with us.

Not surprised in the total brands places, close to gen charts actually for 2020 and 2021 (in fact in 2021 Omega lost second place in front of Cartier )
However didn’t expect that traction of Cartier to keep also in rep world.

Panerai same as real world gen, one of the last places, unfortunately cos I like Panerai.

Curios why so few GMTs as they are all over the forum, Sub is the king as expected

Would be interesting to see also a breakdowns on Omega and Cartier models.

AP and PP as expected.

Nice charts!
 

dogwood

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I just discovered that Hont also uses the same image hosting service as MiroTime, and it would be possible to gather data from his index too... although scrolling through it, he doesn't put a dial picture as the first photo of every QC album (often it's the timegrapher video)... this makes it WAY slower to scroll through the index and collect data without clicking into each QC album.

I'd be keen to collect data from different TDs to see if we can get a better dataset. I'm pretty sure there will be at least some bias in the data coming from MiroTime. Although to be fair there would be a bias in Hont's data too, since he refused to sell Clean Factory for a while after the "Fake Clean" issues last fall.

QUESTION: does anybody know if there are other TDs (other than Miro and Hont) who use szwego.com to host QC photo albums?
 

dogwood

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Would be interesting to see also a breakdowns on Omega and Cartier models.

Here's the breakdown for Cartier. I'm not as good as identifying the sub-variants of the Tank (Cartiers aren't my thing)... so I only have data across three types. Santos with just over 50%, Tank with 40%, and Balon Bleu with 10%.
For Omega I'm even worse at identifying the sub-variants of Seamasters. Although I have a sharp eye for Speedmasters (since I own a gen). So I'm afraid there data for Omega isn't very information rich here. Seamasters (of all types) with 95% and Speedmasters with only 5% (likely due to the eye-sore positioning of the sub-dials).
And because I know the questions are going to be asked... here's the breakdown for AP. In hindsight it would have been good if I'd collected data on Royal Oak 15400, 15500, and 15202 separately.
And finally, the data for Patek Philippe. I should have been more detailed in the breakdown of Nautilus models, but I'm not an expert on the sub-variants, and my goal was to collect a large enough sample size, so I was going quickly. No real surprises here though, the Nautilus is extremely popular with the Aquanaut a distant second place.
 

reppy

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Like others here, I'm surprised at how low Panerai is on this list
But I think there haven't been a lot of good Panerai rep releases lately
 

JayBee0815

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I just discovered that Hont also uses the same image hosting service as MiroTime,

This could distort the data a little, as Hont sells very large quantities via "special promotions", where he then brings watches from certain manufacturers to the people.
 

flashu

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For Omega I'm even worse at identifying the sub-variants of Seamasters. Although I have a sharp eye for Speedmasters (since I own a gen). So I'm afraid there data for Omega isn't very information rich here. Seamasters (of all types) with 95% and Speedmasters with only 5% (likely due to the eye-sore positioning of the sub-dials).

The low percentage of Speedmasters is due to the fact there are no close rep against the gen Moonwatch so there are no actual choices for buyers, I own the gen so I’m fine :p

However for the rest of Seamsters I suspect that vast majority are 300M followed by PO and at the bottom Aquaterra’s

Again thanks for sharing, it might not be 100% accurate but I believe it represents the current status very close to reality
 

DrHack

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Thanks for doing this, very enlightening! I find it interesting that my own favorite brands are all < 2% (Pam, Breitling, IWC). I guess I'm partial to the bigger more casual ones.