Here’s How I See the Watch World Entering 2026

For most people in the luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary watch trade, 2025 lived up to its promise as the Year of the Snake—it was indeed a year of shedding. Rolex shed its reputation for favoring “evolution over revolution” in April when it unveiled the Land-Dweller, featuring a game-changing new movement. Brands continued to shed retail partners as they embraced a direct sales model, a phenomenon embodied by the proliferation of monobrand boutiques across the country and the world. Mostly, though, watchmakers shed sales as worries over inflation and lingering economic uncertainty, amplified by the yo-yoing tariffs, chilled the primary market, dimming prospects for growth.

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I have some ideas about where to look for them. On the product front, it can be helpful to reflect on what was happening three years ago. That’s about the time when 2026 models were conceived and/or developed. In early 2023, the pandemic-era glow had worn off watch sales, kicking off a luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary slowdown that continues to cast a pall over the trade. That was the first post-pandemic year in which makers of hard luxuries felt serious competition from providers of luxury experiences, with the latter often winning out. (Just look to the booming superyacht market, where “sales of boats over 80 meters, about the length of a riverboat cruise ship, almost doubled from 2023 levels, and are on track to hold steady in 2025,” The New York Times reported in November.)

What that suggests to me is a year of muted newness—more cosmetic iterations than bold new displays of watchmaking prowess. For brands looking to fight fire with fire, it also portends more emphasis on experiential retail, and a doubling down on the monobrand retail approach, which allows them to better control the experiences they offer.

Watch predictions for the new year invariably linger on the anniversaries and milestones the industry will celebrate. If you want to get granular (the 50^th anniversary of the Heuer Monza, for example), there are plenty of them. But I’ll just call out the two that strike me as most noteworthy: the 50^th anniversary of the Patek Philippe Nautilus and the 100^th anniversary of Tudor.

In the secondary market, which has to a large extent benefitted from the struggles in the primary market, I expect to see more digital players along the lines of Collected.io and Bezel compete for a piece of the $30 billion pre-owned pie.

This F.P. Journe watch, made exclusively for Francis Ford Coppola, sold for a whopping $10.75 million in a new record for the brand. *Photo: Phillips*

Last but not least come the independents, led by F.P. Journe, which closed 2025 with some monster auction news that either means the brand will continue to burn up the secondary market in 2026 or is poised to fall from its peak. We’ll know more come April, when the brand is due to open its museum in Geneva. Elsewhere in the indie universe (mind you, I’m using the term “indie” extremely loosely), MB&F will introduce the first wristwatch designed by Maximilian Maertens, founder Max Büsser’s hand-picked successor, while Breitling is poised to relaunch the sleeping beauties Universal Genève and Gallet. For their sake, let’s hope the industry’s mood brightens by then.

Personally, I prefer a turbulent market to a placid one, but that’s only because I’m not a seller. As a reporter, it’s far more interesting to write about the Sturm und Drang of the global luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary watch trade than to repeat myself in story after story touting how well everyone is doing. Then again, it’s not like any year is fully good or fully bad. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra famously quipped, but I feel confident about this one: 2026 will be a mixed bag for the watch world. Buckle up and ride on.

This article originally appeared in Robb Report US.