zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

: I can honestly say I didn’t know what gray
: markets were until I started coming to the
: Omega forums. I now know a lot more. One
: great big thank you to John Rochowitz for
: pointing me to a genuine Omega AD.

: I do have a question though. Where do these
: gray markets get the Watches to sell? One
: look on eBay and a company like WOW has
: literally 100’s of different Omegas for
: sale.

Sam is right about ebay. There are as many fakes on there as genuine Omegas, so you really have to "know your seller".

As for the big gray market dealers like worldofwatches and authenticwatches, basically they get their watches from unscrupulous authorized dealers who are violating their contract with Omega by selling to gray market dealers. In fact, if you read the fine print on their websites about why they remove serial numbers from their watches, they'll tell you it's to protect the identity of their sources. Omega can trace a serial number to the AD the watch was sold to, so if it ends up in the hands of a gray market dealer the AD could lose his AD status.

Omega charges its AD's 55% of MSRP for any watch, so if an AD wants to move a lot of inventory, he can buy a lot of watches from Omega and sell them to the gray market dealer for, say, 60% of MSRP. The dealer makes 5% on a huge volume of watches, and has no overhead since the watches go right from Omega to him to the gray market dealer. On a big order this can amount to thousands of dollars in profit for doing nothing more than sending the watches to the gray market dealer.

Likewise, the gray market dealer sells only online, so he doesn't have to pay for a fancy store or pay salespeople their commissions. All he needs is a warehouse and people to man the phones and computers. The gray market dealer may only make 5% profit or so, but on a large volume of watches that also adds up. If everyone weren't making money, the gray market would cease to exist.