Yahoo Lifestyle Dress Watches, Stone Dials, and Jeweled Pieces: What Dealers Are Seeing in Miami Beach
On Thursday, Jan. 9, I was supposed to fly to Miami to attend the Original Miami Beach Antique Show (OMBAS). Up until about three hours before my morning flight, I held out hope that I could still make it. Because if I made it, that would have meant that things in my hometown of Los Angeles were getting back to some kind of normality. Needless to say, I missed my flight.
L.A., as most everyone knows by now, was on fire. As I wrote this piece, the Palisades Fire that began in the coastal community of Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, a wind-whipped Tuesday morning, was still raging, threatening to creep over the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains and race down the hill into my neck of the woods. I live in Lake Balboa, in the flats of the San Fernando Valley, where I am surrounded by a sea of concrete. I didn’t fear (much) for my safety, or the sanctity of my home, but my mom lives in Granada Hills, in the northwest valley, in the Eichler house that I grew up in. She was just blocks from where the Archer Fire popped up on Friday of that week, before an aggressive fire department response, complete with helicopters and bulldozers, squashed the blaze in its tracks. This catastrophe, like some hellish game of whack-a-mole, hit dangerously, and literally, close to home.
It would have been my first time at OMBAS, and I’d been looking forward to the trip for weeks. In addition to speaking to vintage dealers, checking out their coolest wristwatches, and getting a read on trends, I was scheduled to have a conversation with Fred Savage, founder of Timepiece Grading Specialists, in the show’s education area on Friday at 5 p.m. The show had been advertising our talk for days. Savage also lives in L.A. He and I had just chatted on the phone Tuesday morning, as he drove to a meeting in Malibu, about how to structure our talk, which was intended to introduce showgoers to his new authentication and grading service.
As I went to bed on Wednesday night, I weighed the prospect of leaving my family at a time of crisis against the commitment I had made to Savage and the show organizers. When I woke up on Thursday and saw a text from him saying there was “more than a decent chance” that he would cancel his trip, I was off the hook.
Sort of. I still had market research to perform. Work was a welcome distraction—without it, I would have done nothing but refresh the Watch Duty app that everyone in L.A. seems to have downloaded, and spent all my time decoding its real-time fire alerts. Instead, early on Friday morning, I got on the phone with Adam Golden, founder of Menta Watches in Miami, a longtime OMBAS exhibitor, and asked him for his take on the show’s first day.
“Yesterday, we were nonstop from 11 ’til it closed,” Golden told me. “It was absolutely nuts. I hadn’t eaten lunch and by 3, I had to order sandwiches for my team. When the market crashed [in 2022], people shied off from buying. No one wants to catch a falling knife. But once things started leveling off, consumer confidence grew because a stable market is better for everybody. I like to think that my clients buying these watches buy them because they love them. If they can buy a watch for 10 grand and can sell it back to me a year later for the same amount of money, they’re happy.”
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Golden was being trailed by a documentary film crew as we spoke. (“Chasing Time” is the working title of the film he is featured in, about the vintage watch world—he said it would likely be finished by the end of this year.) As he shared his insights about the show, I was struck by his upbeat tone.
“The market is so diverse, there’s no way to predict what somebody is looking for,” Golden said. “If we’d had this conversation 10 years ago, I could have told you exactly what we’d sell overnight and what would take months to sell. Now, I can’t predict anything. That change became apparent towards the latter half of 2022. As a lot of people were losing money on things like Royal Oaks, content creators like Mike Nouveau helped push the narrative that you don’t have to buy a Nautilus to be a collector. We’ve seen the rise of vintage Cartier, and unusual, shaped cases and Rolex stone dials growing in popularity, not to mention Cellini models and King Midases that nobody cared about. If you’d offered me the King Midas 10 years ago, we’d have put it on a scale, weighed the gold and sold it for melt value.”
Golden predicted that in 2025, we’d see a continuation of the smaller dress watch trend as well as a continuation of people looking for more classic high-profile watches like the Patek Philippe perpetual calendar Ref. 3940 and the Patek perpetual calendar chronograph Ref. 3970 (“It was stagnant for 10 years, but it’s been a fast mover,” Golden said).
“I think sports watches are always going to be in demand, but people are really looking for something different,” he said. “There’s more focus on interesting design and jeweled pieces, like an Audemars Piguet Cobra that has a cool bracelet.”
Morgan Cardet, president of Matthew Bain, a Miami vintage dealer, echoed Golden’s point about jeweled pieces—especially ladies’ watches by Cartier and Piaget, and stone dial models by blue-chip makers. “The Cartier Panthère and Santos are on fire,” Cardet said. “Vintage Bulgari Serpentis are selling—I sold a couple at the show. And anything with a stone dial, primarily Rolex but really anything with a stone dial. Patek and Piaget have great stone dials.”
For years, women gravitated to chunky men’s sport styles, but that phenomenon seems to have come to an end, Cardet said: “I don’t see women wearing sport watches anymore, they’re going after more ladies watches. Smaller watches are selling. And ladies’ Royal Oaks are really hot.”
Like Golden, Cardet also highlighted a paradigm shift in the kinds of watches that are now trending. “Forever it was sportier watches from the ’60s and ’70s and now the trend has shifted to luxury watches from the ’80s and ’90s,” he said. “During the pandemic, 10 models became hype watches. Price didn’t matter—people would pay triple or quadruple retail. In early ’22, that all came crashing down. Now people are looking for value, to differentiate themselves. A perpetual calendar that you could buy at retail for $100,000 and now for $30,000 or $40,000 is really exciting.”
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