Hong Kong luxury Watch Shopping Wonderland

You may have heard that Hong Kong is a watch shopping paradise, but you may have also heard that the deep discounts the city was once known for are now a thing of the past. These are both true in a way. You will not simply find a lot of new watches at unbelievable prices, but you will find a preowned watch selection like nowhere else. We easily spent 45 minutes just freaking out in front of a long display window tightly packed with what can only be described as watch lovers’ wet dreams. Not seeing the shop's entrance at first, I wondered aloud if it was a museum. When we had to tear ourselves away for a dinner meeting, we peeked around the corner only to see a hallway lined with more similar shops.

How does the tiny island of Hong Kong compare to other major watch markets? It has been noted that there is a particularly strong and widespread culture of watch respect and appreciation among the Chinese. In terms of boutiques and new watch retail, I have personally never seen such a density of watch stores and advertising as I did in Hong Kong, except perhaps in Singapore – Macau is also purported to be not lagging behind. In Hong Kong, though, these multiple districts seem to be both large and many.

Hong Kong has no sales tax - I can imagine how cheap and convenient it must be for the many Chinese shoppers coming from the mainland where watch prices are highly inflated due to import taxes, and that dynamic only bolsters Hong Kong’s watch scene. It is easy to say that Hong Kong has everything, from mainstream to niche, all the way down to the guys standing outside the high-end watch boutiques aggressively hawking replicas of what’s inside. So, while there is a lot to look at in terms of new watches in Hong Kong, we are here today primarily to talk about pre-owned watches. What do you think happens to all those crazy watches that are sold when their owners get tired of them? Many end up here, is the answer – and we reckon many more are yet to come.

Pre-owned watches, as we know, can be a tricky thing. But while the wonderful Internet has served to equalize secondhand watch prices through information and education, it has also been a force in making buying safer, with more aware buyers and more accountable sellers. Most of those selling fakes and replicas seem to be upfront about what they are selling nowadays, anyway. In any market, fakes and “frankenwatches” remain a concern, of course, and while we cannot make any unequivocal guarantees about what you may encounter, we judged most of what we saw to be legit.