It is now the tail-end of 2024, a year that many people will not miss — including many folks in the watch industry. 2024 was defined by a sharp (and predictable) decrease in the growth of luxury goods consumption across the world, lower consumer and investor confidence, political turmoil, and uncertainty about where tomorrow’s growth areas will be. Given how long the timepiece industry has been around, little of this is novel. The watch industry has endured global war and revolts several times over but not necessarily by maintaining the status quo during such tumultuous times. If history is a guide, what does 2025 have in store for the watch industry, and what do the industry’s current actions tell us about the year to come? Below, I share five aBlogtoWatch predictions for the global luxury watch industry in 2025. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. To personify what I feel is the watch industry’s mood toward the coming year (i.e., a time warp in the sense that most of the ideas implemented in 2025 are going to be old ideas repeated from the past), let’s first listen to Richard O’Brien’s classic “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sober Colors Will Recapture The Imaginations Of Watch Designers

The last few years of new watch releases often felt like a walk through the jungle. Bright colors, loud designs, and “look at me” aesthetics typified many new products. Bright colors and designs proved popular in an era when new products needed to compete for attention in picture-heavy online media environments, where classic designs are also often judged as boring (and thus not particularly engaging). To capture as much online consumer attention as possible and as a way of offering consumers novelty without having to substantially alter products, a universe of rich colors populated the timepiece realm in recent history. My prediction is that, while consumers will still have a healthy appetite for non-traditional watch colors, the era of living in the jungle will soon end.

In-person (as opposed to online) buyers tend to universally prefer more “sober” colors, which are not as bold and inconsistent with the colors most people wear. Black, blue, gray, silver, white, and other classic colors will be what most people end up buying to wear on their wrists since such colors simply go better with the colors of clothing most people actually wear. Designers also often prefer using classic colors because they like shapes and materials to sell a product, not the mere use of visually exciting hues. For a number of years now, I’ve joked about how, after so many highly colorful watches, someone will start to release monochromatic designs and be heralded for their design-forwardness (even though the old joke is that few people are demanding more black-dialed watches). I anticipate this to start happening more often in 2025. Wild colors will still have a place in the catalog of every brand, but no longer will looking through a list of new watches be like trying to identify an exotic frog, bird, or insect in one of Earth’s rare bastions of biodiversity.

The Threat Of Tariffs Will Prompt Watch Prices To Fall

No one is quite sure how or if tariffs (American or otherwise) will be deployed by governments in 2025. What’s clear is that tariffs will be used not as revenue generators but as weapons to compel action in areas not always related to trade. This means there is uncertainty regarding if tariffs will happen, what they will target, and how long they will last. More so, if tariffs are levied, it is not clear that the luxury watch industry will be a target, whether on the supply or consumer side. The global watch industry is pretty small by most industry standards, and thus putting pressure on it isn’t going to achieve too many political concessions.

With that said, there is a very real possibility that tariffs may increase the cost of buying a new watch for consumers, and/or cause increases in prices for the costs of watch parts and components (this latter proposition is very concerning to a number of watch brands, especially smaller ones). Either instance will result in higher prices for people buying watches. What makes tariff-based price increases particularly problematic is that the watch industry has, in general, been jacking up retail prices over the last few years. Newly increased prices plus tariffs will most certainly create market shocks that will stop many willing consumers from engaging in transactions. Therefore, if the watch industry continues its current course and does not at least consider the possibility of tariffs, many brands may find it very difficult to do business because of highly uncompetitive pricing.

One probable answer as a response to such uncertainty is for brands to engage in cost reductions now. If their watches cost lower now, then even with tariffs applied to their sale or components, retail prices will not appear as high as other brands’ products currently for sale. So in a market where increased costs are levied unilaterally against the luxury timepiece industry as a whole (differing by region of course), only those who can pass on the least expensive production costs will be able to offer competitive retail prices to consumers. Many brands might be wise to halt or even reverse some of their recent cost increases so that their products will be that much more competitive in an environment where all watches will need to cost more. Alternatively, brands who have increased prices may not be able to further increase them and will need to absorb the increased cost of doing business instead of enjoying any increases in profits they anticipated from choosing to raise prices.

Even without tariffs, there is plenty of evidence of consumer revolt against recent price hikes. Faced with lower sales volumes and growth regions, luxury brands have tried to maintain profits by simply asking their existing customers to pay more. If this were just a few percentage points more, I don’t think buyers would balk that much. But some luxury goods cost over 100% now than they did just a few years ago, and many goods have increased prices by two-digit percentage points over just a few-year period. Even the wealthiest of collectors are starting to complain that their generosity is being leaned on too much by the industry. My belief is that industry executives eager to curry favor with consumers in a buyer’s market will acknowledge that prices have been going a bit wild recently and will significantly tone it down. The alternative to pricing reality checks is going to be stagnating product inventories that will not move because stubborn managers don’t want to budge on price when consumer interest has already meandered elsewhere.

A Deficit Of Independent Media Will Prompt The Watch Industry To Lean Further On Consumers

Independent media companies like aBlogtoWatch that cover the watch industry are a rare species today. Sustained neglect and misplaced disdain for advertising spending in high-quality publications (wristwatch-focused or otherwise) has led to a major drop in the availability of professional media to cover the watch industry’s news and campaigns. A major reason watch brands stopped spending money on professional media is because they believed they could bypass opinion leaders and reach consumers directly using tools like social media advertising and producing their own content. This experiment is reversing course because what many brands learned over the last few years is that it actually costs far more to sustainably reach a consumer population by doing it yourself versus working with established media outlets. Nevertheless, even if watch brands all started contributing to a healthy variety of watch media titles today, it would take a few years before that would result in significantly more professional media in the space to cover watch industry news.

Therefore, I predict that watch brands and the luxury industry will take a different route altogether. Rather than try to reach consumers as much via social media and special content creation, they will simply start encouraging a lot more consumers to attend events that were traditionally intended for media and members of the press. Watches & Wonders is already doing that in 2025 by offering the general public the chance to purchase a VIP Ticket — tantamount to a paid press pass. The cost of this ticket is expensive enough to dissuade pedestrian timepiece enthusiasts but is ideal for someone who likes watches, wants to plan an athletic adventure of trade show trekking, and wants to create content for their Instagram account. In essence, Watches & Wonders is democratizing who can enter the event to encourage consumers to pick up the slack where traditional media left off.

The industry surely understands that such an exhausting and expensive adventure is not something your average amateur collector can consistently do year after year. I believe the watch industry is relying on there being enough “new blood” (i.e., fresh watch enthusiasts) regularly being created, that aspiration alone will fuel a mecca to Watches & Wonders for a new generation of fans on a regular basis. There is no argument to be made that citizen media creators and watch fans will be able to consistently sustain the vacuum left by career watch media professionals who track the industry over a period of years and offer as much insight as they do wisdom and perspective (not to mention constructive feedback and criticism that brands need to year, and that polite novices will rarely offer). Already, most regional watch events around the world are consumer-centric (you can buy watches at the events), as opposed to media-centric or focused on business-to-business networking and agreements.

What mainly fuels the watch industry’s reliance on consumers to make up for media coverage vacuums is not practicality but rather that the industry habitually leans on consumers to solve industry problems. Consumers contribute to 100% of the money made by the timepiece industry and yet brands routinely ask consumers to put up with increased costs and to absorb faulty or overscheduled workmanship without limits or repercussions. That the watch industry is now expecting consumers to both purchase their watches and spread the word about them (in a world without much professional media) is hardly surprising. However, like many of their wobbly communication plans, the economics involved will quickly cause consumers to rebel since enjoying their hobby will increasingly be seen as work as opposed to leisure. If watch brands can’t make collecting and attending events fun (and painless), then their citizen armies of fans will do precipitously less and less free work for them.

Talent Recycling Will Be In Full Force As Big Watch Brands Fail To Attract Fresh Staff

The same person who ran Jaeger-LeCoultre watches when I started covering the watch industry is now back at the helm of the Richemont-owned Swiss watchmaker. The competent and stalwart Jerome Lambert returns as CEO from a high-level position on the corporate side of the business within the group. I am excited about this, but it also marks an interesting new trend worth discussing. For a number of years now, the luxury watch industry attempted to attract new talent from other industries to laterally move into the luxury watch space. The stated goal of bringing in outsiders was to solicit new ideas. Ironically, things didn’t work out that way. What most brands actually wanted was for new people to come into the industry only to validate existing ideas and ways of doing business. The watch industry has always been flush with fresh ideas for products as well as for doing business from the people who already work within it. Thus, bringing in people from outside industries to massage the luxury watch space ended up as a collective failure simply because the greater watch industry was simply unwilling or not ready to actually implement novel ideas.

Now the trend of hiring as much outside top-level talent is ending. The watch industry fully understands that its top leaders and managers must understand the watch industry’s business and culture through experience alone. No hotshot novice can come in to disrupt and improve like some Hollywood movie about business innovation. The watch industry also effectively has no training programs for most brand managers (something I have discussed in great detail when sharing how the industry needs more educational vectors for people working in the industry who aren’t going to be watchmakers), so good employees are “made” as opposed to discovered. In 2025, I suspect that brands will continue to recycle employees and talent as opposed to being able to attract a lot of fresh talent.

A contributing issue is that working at a luxury watch brand is no longer seen as a cherry gig for many workers. The last few years have seen unpleasant work environments or career stagnation for many people at larger brands. Lots of talented men and women have left the watch industry for greener pastures. Some go on to start their own timepiece small brands, but such tiny companies rarely have the means to employ others or create additional jobs (thereby not meaningfully contributing to the overall industry economy). This is a problem because the watch industry is run by emotion, passion, and relationships. Unhappy or unmotivated workers (be they new talent or industry veterans) cannot contribute in the way that is needed to achieve sales success. The only hope is that as industry talent moves around from job to job, they will settle in a position that is a good fit for them and which they will choose to remain in for at least five or so years. Celebrated CEOs like Jerome Lambert were at Jaeger-LeCoultre for nearly 20 years. Leaders who remain in their position for just a few years rarely get much done in that time. The same goes for most other key watch brand employees.

Brands Without Marketing Power Will Fall Behind As The Cost Of Attention Increases

Earlier in this article I mentioned that learning about new watches on the internet was like walking through the jungle. Part of that means any successful brands or models will need to cut through the noise and distinguish themselves among the many options and alternatives vying for a consumer’s heart and money. To achieve this, brands need to rely on regular marketing activity or be lucky enough to routinely be a topic of conversation and receive word-of-mouth awareness. Since the dawn of social media, watch brands and other advertisers have experimented with alternative forms of marketing to traditional advertising by using the litany of new tools made available through innovative internet marketing tools. All watch brands intuitively understand that marketing is essential to their success, but many harbor different opinions on how to achieve it and where to spend advertising budgets. This business style variety allows for a very healthy ecosystem in the market and a lot of different competing ways for watch brands to reach and sustain relationships with customers. With that said, the cost of marketing across the board will start to go up if it hasn’t already.

As social media platforms mature, they are both increasingly saturated with competing content and subject to increasing internal scrutiny about profitability. New regulations and advertising restrictions for platforms around the world will drive down the volume of advertising and to adjust, many firms will raise prices to sustain profits. Advertising on many platforms is also effectively a bidding system, and when demand increases, so do the costs. As more and more watch brands lean on social media platforms, the cost of reaching consumers only increases. The heyday of getting very large audiences quickly and cheaply on social media platforms is solidly over. The era of modest social media reach for non-paying businesses is now coming to an end. In the coming years, only the most interesting and engaging brands will be able to rely on social media platforms to truly connect with consumers, and not have to pay those platforms to distribute their content to more people on a regular basis. The free advertising and connection directly to consumers that was promised for entertaining content will start to disappear for many types of users and accounts and platforms will start to demand they pay for performance. This means that watch brand advertising who specialize in “organic” reach online, will have to adjust their strategies, and in many instances, begin to pay for forms of advertising to reach consumers. That type of advertising will vary and will include marketing on social media platforms as well as niche-interest publications like aBlogtoWatch.

The harsh news is that brands with interesting products and stories, but little marketing budget will find it much harder to reach customers in an era when a dominant player in affordable online advertising gets an oversaturation of attention. This might make it impossible for certain smaller brands to reach the critical mass of eyeballs necessary to launch their first few products, or for companies who have initial success to scale up because platforms limit the engagement they can receive for free. For this reason, the enthusiast community of watch lovers around the world is going to be a key area for brand marketing in 2025 and beyond. Even within that microcosm, there are a lot of ways to invest in engaging with enthusiast consumers be it via in-person events or with compelling digital content narratives that take brand fans on a unique journey.

Many very small watch brands are still founded with the anticipation that they will not need a marketing budget to reach buyers. For at least 15 years, a lot of internet entrepreneurs were lucky to enjoy the free and cheap message distribution and community building that social media could offer. No one expected that party to last forever. As mentioned above, the logical progression of how social media platforms are evolving is to charge marketers for access to their users. This is a much deeper topic that I cannot fully get into here. Going with the original thesis about how the cost of getting attention for brands will increase — more expensive social media advertising prices and other factors will contribute to the cost of reaching watch enthusiast consumers going up in 2025.