At its peak hype era, the steel Audemars Piguet Offshore Chronograph 26470ST retailed for around $33,300 from an authorized retailer. As of May 2026, its estimate on the secondary market is $20,300. Although the watch hasn't changed, the market around it has. Taste has shifted too. Big celebrities have been spotted wearing small watches: Colman Domingo wore a 28mm Omega Constellation to the 2025 Golden Globes, Jacob Elordi a 35mm diamond-set Cartier Privé Tank Normale to the 2026 edition, and Timothée Chalamet a 25mm Cartier Baignoire to the 2025 Oscars.
The brands have moved in the same direction. At Watches & Wonders in April, IWC drew the Big Pilot's Watch Perpetual Calendar down to 42mm and set a 36mm Pilot's Watch beside it, dimensions that would have read as ordinary through the mid-century, when a man's watch typically measured 34 to 36mm. Audemars Piguet had signalled the same shift a few months earlier, unveiling new 23mm Royal Oak Mini models at its Social Club in February.
Photo: Audemars Piguet
Photo: Audemars Piguet
None of this would matter much if a watch were only a watch. For many, it's also an asset, and the past few years thoroughly tested that claim. Since its March 2022 peak, the WatchCharts Overall Market Index, a basket of resale prices across the major brands, has shed about a third of its value, and Bain & Company ranked watches the worst-performing luxury category of 2025. Anyone who bought at the top of the 2021 boom is likely still underwater, which raises a question worth more than any single watch: how much should resale value, or the trend of the moment, decide what someone buys at all?
Resale prices have never been easier to track. Chrono24 and WatchCharts turn any reference into a live ticker, updated by the hour. Georgia Benjamin, a watch collector and content creator, says she pays them little mind. "I've never really approached watches purely through the lens of resale," she said. "There's a bigger question here: if you're buying with the primary intention of selling, are you collecting or are you flipping?" She recognized the anxiety those live numbers can feed. "When you can see prices moving in real time, it's very easy to second-guess yourself. Watches are emotional objects, and constant exposure to pricing can take away from that."
That instinct shows up in the place where the watches change hands. Sarah Fergusson, a senior watch specialist at Bonhams, said "the majority of buyers we speak with ahead of our auctions are private individuals, usually seeking advice on a watch's condition or history rather than its investment potential." Her house works both sides of the sale, and the demand she sees is uneven. While parts of the market have softened, blue-chip vintage like the 40mm Rolex Comex divers has appreciated over a far longer run.
Photo: IWC Schaffhausen
For all the talk of watches as assets, few buyers are in it to flip. In Deloitte's 2025 study across the major watch markets, only 5% of buyers planned to resell soon after purchase, though 17% still called the watch an investment.
On the secondary market, the watch the new mood has rewarded is Cartier. Its smaller, dressier classics, the Tank and the Santos, pulled in a younger crowd, with the brand's share of purchases among Gen Z roughly quadrupling over seven years, from 1.7% to 6.8%. Cartier was also one of only a handful of names whose resale prices rose last year.
To Benjamin, the watches aren't shrinking so much as returning to themselves. "What we're really seeing is a return to original proportions," she said. The sales data mirrors her read: Chrono24, which logs millions of transactions a year, found buyers stepping back from oversized cases in 2025, demand for rectangular shapes up 9.3% on the year. For Benjamin, what really changed is why people buy. "People are buying for themselves rather than for others," she said, "and that naturally brings them back to sizes that feel more authentic and wearable."
