CaratPiaget doubles at Bonhams, and the trophy era loosens
Record spring sales saw Piaget models double and triple in value, a 1970s Cartier Bamboo Coussin bring $114,800 and a gold Polo Jumbo $33,280 — while a 1930s Rolex Prince went for $2,176. The market is widening, not just rising.
§1Below the trophy line.
The auction market's most interesting move this season is happening below the trophy line. Bonhams reports record results from its spring watch sales, and the names doing the work are not the usual two. Piaget models doubled and in some cases tripled in value, and Cartier posted similarly steep gains from lower starting prices. The evidence lots tell the story compactly: an 18-carat gold Cartier 'Bamboo' Coussin from the 1970s brought $114,800 in New York in April, and a gold Piaget Polo Jumbo from around 1980 made $33,280 in an online sale.
§2A structural change.
Jonathan Darracott, Bonhams' global head of watches, reads the results as a structural change rather than a hot streak: "demand extends far beyond a handful of trophy watches". The bidder pool has broadened past the Rolex-and-Patek axis that defined the last decade, with younger and more diverse collectors driving the growth, and dress watches, the category the sports-watch era left for dead, are selling alongside the steel classics. Neo-vintage, the house believes, stays strong from here.
A Prince, for all its history, looks like a museum's idea of a watch.
The counter-evidence lot is as instructive as the records. A gold-plated Rolex Prince from around 1930, a genuine piece of the crown's history, sold online for $2,176. The market is not paying for age or even for the name in isolation; it is paying for design language it currently wants, and right-now taste favors the shaped gold watch, the integrated seventies silhouette, the piece that photographs like jewelry. A Prince, for all its history, looks like a museum's idea of a watch.
§3The middle of the pyramid.
The pattern matches what the wider tape has shown all month. Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet still tighten their grip on secondary-market value retention, certified pre-owned premiums are compressing, and the seven-figure trophy segment keeps setting records at Sotheby's and Phillips. What Bonhams' spring adds is the middle of the pyramid: five-figure money moving into names that cost four figures three years ago. That is how collecting categories mature, from a leaderboard into a landscape.
Piaget doubling at auction while a 1930s Rolex sells for the price of a new Tissot is the same lesson twice: the market has stopped buying brands and started buying eras. The seventies gold shaped watch is this cycle's winner, and the houses with deep archives there, Piaget and Cartier above all, are effectively sitting on unpriced inventory.
Dealers should check their safes for bamboo lugs before Bonhams checks them first.
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