Rolex is estimated to spend around 100 million dollars on marketing a year and they have built up a superb brand reputation over nearly 125 years. And they make around a million watches a year, which will substantially increase when massive new production facilities are ready.

Yet the internet is still full of conspiracies about Rolex, or dealers, or both (take your pick) holding back stock to deliberately annoy collectors who can’t buy the watch seemingly everyone on the planet wants to buy, rather than accepting the more banal likelihood that thanks to its excellent marketing and reputation, demand simply exceeds supply.

In a parallel universe, independent watchmakers making sensational timepieces struggled to find the handful of clients they needed just to stay in business, and many didn’t and folded.

Then in 2020, COVID hit and shook the world like a snow globe in a cocktail shaker. And while that devastated many business sectors, it transformed the world of independent watchmaking from a horological niche to mainstream acceptance.

The result: it’s now easier to buy a Submariner than a watch from an independent.

It used to be that when an independent launched a new watch, they would show it off at the big watch fairs and desperately wait for a sale. It’s now extremely difficult to get on Akriva’s list for the chance to buy one of their watches sometime in the future, but when he launched his brand in 2012, it took Rexhep Rexhepi a full year to sell his first watch.

Now, if you are interested in buying a watch from an independent, with luck, a fat wallet, and a fast-moving do-or-die attitude, you might be lucky to get one of the few launch editions after seeing a few photos or CAD sketches. But even then, you would still have to be lucky (or very well connected). More likely the watches will already be sold out before there’s even a whisper that they are in development.

So here’s a whisper (keep it to yourself).