Two of the Most Respected Luxury Watch Databases Are Merging
When Giovanni Prigigallo—an horologically-minded former Harvard student and employee who left the straight-up tech industry to work for EveryWatch—walked me through their website last summer, my skepticism about yet another tech company drawn to the alluring world of watches melted away as I witnessed AI-assisted algorithms crunch decades of watch-sale data into legible and useful graphs and charts. On Monday of this week, EveryWatch announced its acquisition of WatchAuctionHQ.com, another online database that had also been assembling watch auction data with the goal of empowering collectors.
This merger seems inevitable. The two platforms were essentially attempting to provide the same service, and as a merged entity the services should improve for collectors—provided, that is, the collecting community can trust EveryWatch.com to crunch data meaningfully and to avoid the deceitfulness that sometimes creeps into the lucrative business of auctioning watches.
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There doesn’t appear to be any reason not to trust these firms. EveryWatch claims that its AI-assisted data analysis tools even prevent unwarranted inflations and depreciations by eliminating anomalous sales results. Paul Newman’s Daytona, which sold for $17.8 million in 2017, is an example of how a particularly hot night of raising paddles could skew the value of a reference—not entirely unlike the A+ kid in school who “blows the curve” for the rest of the class. Prigigallo said their code was good at figuring out a realistic market value for a Patek Philippe 5117.
WatchAuctionHQ was founded by Marc Montagne, a former PayPal tribe member who left tech to pursue his horological passions—a trend in these ciricles. In his revised career, Montagne helped to bring Jaeger-LeCoultre and Vacheron Constantin to the world of online sales—a move that the ever-conservative Swiss firms made amusingly late in the 2010s under the presumed assumption that no one would spend big money on a watch they’d never handled in person. Times have certainly changed for luxury markets, and tech-savvy folks like Montagne have been at the forefront of infusing the warm world of luxury with cool zeros and ones.
But it wasn’t all cold data crunching at WatchAuctionHQ. Montagne also wrote the book Invest in Watches: The Art of Watch Collecting, hosted a French-language podcast called Repetition Minute, and generally brought the global community of high-end watch collectors closer together. In my estimation, it was precisely this warm and fuzzy community spirit that the data-driven EveryWatch needed to acquire in order to enliven its powerful platform.
We will watch closely to see how this merger shapes up, and we will offer up a primer on using EveryWatch.com’s powerful tools soon, as well.
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