The logic for buying a counterfeit watch used to be obvious: it was cheaper than the real thing. Sure, a quick inspection might reveal it to be a knock-off but it lasted a few years and looked the part. From a distance. But the business is going through seismic change, such that some 40m fakes are now circulated every year, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. The problem now is that they can be very, very hard to tell from the real thing.
According to a 2023 report by the used watch dealer Watchfinder and Co, five years ago some 80% of fakes that passed through its hands were readily identifiable as counterfeits, with 20% requiring further investigation. Now, it says, those percentages have been reversed.
There are many reasons for this. For one - and you won’t hear this often - it’s because the quality of real Swiss-made watches has, for some brands, declined. That’s at least according to Fabrice Gueroux, author of ‘Real & Fake Watches’ and the man high-rolling collectors turn to when they want a watch authenticated. “The borderline difference in quality between counterfeit and genuine watches can make spotting those counterfeits the hardest,” says Gueroux. “With some brands - usually those seeking an especially high margin - the quality of the counterfeits is actually better…"
Which brings us to the second reason. If counterfeit manufacturing used to be dominated by around five well-known mega-factories, all in China, now production has spread further afield - to the likes of Vietnam and Thailand. As with any business, increased competition either pushes down prices or pushes up quality, and it’s the latter that has happened. These manufacturers have - like genuine manufacturers - access to the latest manufacturing technology too, which also allows them to keep up with anti-counterfeiting measures. This has given rise to what those in the business call the ‘super-fakes’, their parts sometimes even made in a shadow economy of producers who make parts for the official brands.
These super-fakes are especially problematic because, the more a counterfeit passes for the real thing, the less consumers are ready to pay so much more for the real thing. Even flipping that doesn’t help: the deep disregard some might feel towards a fake - psychologists call it, rather strongly, “moral disgust” - can spill over into the genuine article too. If there are such good fake Rolexes, for example, the allure of a real one - which starts to look a bit fake itself - starts to fade somewhat too…
These super-fakes are also changing the nature of the booming secondary market. Not long ago only an idiot might have thought that a watch bought for a fraction of the usual price was the genuine article. Now it only takes a very good fake to be priced not as a suspicious bargain, but with a decent saving, for it to be bought thinking it is genuine; and then to be sold on to the next buyer in the honest belief that it is.
The wealthiest of watch buyers can fall for this: the musician John Meyer and the Brazilian footballer Neymar have both spoken of finding out, much later, that they’d bought a fake. But even the brands can fall for it too: when Omega paid $3.4m at auction for a 1957 Speedmaster in 2021, it later discovered that it had been assembled using different parts from different vintage watches - it was, as they say in the trade, a ‘Frankenwatch’. One in five watch buyers have accidentally bought a fake, Watchfinder & Co reckons.
Small wonder then that the Swiss watch industry is scrabbling to persuade people not to buy fakes, especially since, as the Federation points out, for the money spent on a quality counterfeit you could buy a quality Swiss-made watch (if not from one of the flashier brands). Unfortunately, its reasons not to buy - according to Xuemei Bian, professor of marketing at Northumbria University, who has made a study of the psychology of buying counterfeits - are not very convincing: that it has a negative impact on employment in the Swiss watch industry, or that it hits the big brands’ profits, or that they have spent millions and taken years to build the brand reputation that counterfeiters are now cashing in on. That may be true, but their products wouldn’t be counterfeited if they hadn’t done so.
A plea to authenticity might work. One of its campaigns has stated “fake watches are for fake people”, and, as Bian explains, there’s always a lingering self-doubt that comes with wearing a counterfeit: does this mean I’m cheap too? What do my peers make of my choice?
But then her ground-breaking research into this topic has revealed some major curve-balls: that, for one, part of the appeal of buying a counterfeit watch is the thrill of the hunt. “There’s a fun factor in finding the best counterfeit for the right price. There’s a sense now of people who buy counterfeits belonging to a kind of ‘secret society’,” she says. A minority buy counterfeits deliberately to stick it to the man - the man being the leading watch brands with their ‘outrageous’ prices and retail policies that can make it all but impossible for anyone who is not a major celebrity to get hold of a certain watch.
And then there’s the biggest twist of all. There’s a growing base of consumers, Bian has found, who buy fakes for the pleasure they take in how good the fake is, and the technical accomplishment it has required. Indeed, she has found that there are plenty of affluent people who buy counterfeit watches when they could buy the real thing - and who might even own the real thing as well. “Other people are less likely to question whether their watch is real or fake, because these people look the part,” she says. “But it’s also because they just see mixing up their watches - real and fake - as fun, or a bit naughty.”
The fact that it’s no longer just about price makes tackling the counterfeit trade, as Gueroux points out, all but impossible. The only thing the Swiss watch industry can do, he reckons, is to push even harder towards excellence - in design, in materials, in finishing - in order to put clear blue water between themselves and the counterfeiters. And that is a huge challenge. The best they can hope for, if they can pull this off, is that fake watches start to look like fakes once again.
