Inside SwissWatchExpo’s Massive Pre-Owned Operation

About a year ago, Eugene Tutunikov, chief executive of the pre-owned watch e-tailer SwissWatchExpo, invited me to visit the company’s showroom in Atlanta. Ever since the start of the pandemic, when a lack of supply in primary channels led to a surge in demand for secondhand timepieces, Tutunikov, one of my regular sources, had proven to be an astute commentator on the pre-owned category. I knew he’d offer a good perspective on how the market was faring now that demand, which peaked in 2022, had settled back down to more sustainable levels.
 
It took a while to coordinate the trip, but last week, on my way home to Los Angeles from New York, I made a pitstop in Atlanta to tour the family-owned operation and have dinner with my hosts, Tutunikov and co-owners Victoria and Jake Rokhlin (Tutunikov’s mother and stepfather).
 
“Welcome to SwissWatchExpo,” Victoria said when I stepped inside the 7,000-square-foot showroom in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead neighborhood. “The first thing people say is, ‘Well, it does not look like a regular jewelry store.’ Some people say it looks more like a trading floor.”
 
They’re right. That’s because in the center of the ground level retail space, within a perimeter encircled by showcases brimming with rare gem-set Rolexes, obscure Patek Philippe Neptunes, gold-flecked Cartier Tanks, and complicated Breguets—more than 3,000 Swiss watches in total—sits a row of desks staffed by salespeople accustomed to greeting their clients, located nationwide, virtually.
 
Every watch posted to the e-tailer’s website includes a link to “request FaceTime viewing.” “The button does two things,” Tutunikov explained. “One, you can request a FaceTime viewing. Two, it tells the person we actually have the watch.” That may sound obvious, but in the world of online retail, it’s not uncommon for dealers to post images of merchandise they do not own. “A lot of people just post pictures and sell the watch and then try to figure out where to buy it,” Tutunikov said. “And who knows what’s inside.”

At SwissWatchExpo, 11 people in the service department—an authorized service center for TAG Heuer as well as brands from the Richemont and Swatch groups—make it their business to know. And thanks to an open-kitchen-style layout, visitors, both physical and virtual, can watch as team members service and authenticate the site’s timepieces. “Once customers see all this, it really adds a lot of credibility,” Tutunikov said.
 
So, too, does the company’s selection, vast by most retail standards. “You look under a plant, there’ll probably be a watch,” Tutunikov joked as he toured me around the showroom, where timepieces filled showcases, teetered on shelves and sat in trays, awaiting their inspection in the service department.
 
SwissWatchExpo, which was established in 2009, has occupied the two-story building since 2019, before the pandemic attracted scores of opportunists to the category. Indeed, in the heady days of late 2021 and early 2022, it seemed like everybody and their brother was a pre-owned Rolex dealer, with an Instagram storefront to prove it. “You saw so many small players enter the market for a quick buck,” Tutunikov said. “But A, they didn’t have the ability to authenticate and refurbish watches the way we do. And B, as soon as they started losing a little bit of money, they exited the space.”
 
Think back to the spring of 2022, when the start of the Ukraine War in February and the crypto collapse in May triggered an ongoing correction in pre-owned prices. As the market continues to consolidate, SwissWatchExpo has emerged as a leading player, especially for bread-and-butter timepieces from the likes of Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Omega, and Breitling. Its success, however, has been a long time in the making. The company has its roots in Ukraine during the Soviet era. That was where Jake, a civil engineer, learned how to be a watchmaker. 
 
During my showroom tour, Jake explained how he found his way to the watch business. “I got into an accident when I was 23 and I needed to do something to be able to survive,” he said. “Watchmaking was one of the things I tried, and I stuck with it.” In 1989, Jake fled Ukraine on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, bound for New York City. Two years later, he arrived in Atlanta, where he relied on his experience repairing watches to land a job at Maier & Berkele, a family-owned Atlanta jeweler and authorized Rolex dealer later acquired by Mayors.

A few years passed and Jake, who’d gone through Rolex’s watchmaker training, began a side hustle: buying used watches, refurbishing them and selling them on for a small profit. “It showed me that it could be lucrative, and I enjoyed it because I was putting my passion for watches into business,” he told Robb Report. “And it was the era where the United States as a watch field was absolutely not discovered yet. They were joking that garbage men in Europe had better watches than American millionaires. And it was true.”
 
In 2007, Jake and his business partner opened a small jewelry store that offered a modest selection of secondhand watches. A year later, they dissolved the partnership. But Jake persisted. During this time, he and Victoria, a computer programmer whom he knew from high school in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, had reconnected. (She and Tutunikov also emigrated to the U.S. in 1989, but they settled in Bucks County, Penn.) When Victoria relocated to Atlanta, she joined Jake in the watch retail business. So new was she to timepieces that for the first month, she wore her watch upside down.
 
It was early days for the secondhand watch market, but the Rokhlins, who acquired most of their inventory at watch shows around the country, were determined to make a go of it. “We found a nice place on Peachtree Street, and our windows were our billboard,” Victoria recalled. Soon, she talked Jake into creating a website. “I still remember when Jake said, ‘Why do you need a shopping cart there? Who will buy used watch online for $3,000?’ It sounds funny today, right?” (Today, the site’s average selling price is $9,500.)
 
Slowly, the website attracted buyers, enough to inspire Victoria’s son, Tutunikov, a graduate of New York University who worked as a trader on Wall Street, to use his bonus money to help his mom and stepfather purchase more inventory. “I invested the bonus, but I never really thought I would actually get involved with the business,” he said. “But then after a handful of years, I decided I would come down and give it a shot.”

Tutunikov arrived in Atlanta in July 2016. “It was us three and a couple of employees, in a much smaller space,” he said. “Two-thirds of the business when I joined was through marketplaces like eBay and Chrono24, and then one-third directly to us. For us to sell a watch, we had to be the cheapest in the world. We didn’t have any reviews online, so we wanted to build credibility. We needed a new website. Slowly, we started to improve a lot of things, do more digital marketing, SEO, and we started to grow pretty quickly. That first year, I think we grew 75 percent or 80 percent, and then another 50 percent the following year. And I knew there was something to it. Consumers were just getting ready to be comfortable shopping online for large ticket items. We were maybe at that time—in 2016—still a little bit early, but it was great because it gave us the foundation.”
 
By 2019, the company was doing about $25 million to $30 million in sales and needed a bigger, better showroom, Tutunikov said. When he bought a pre-construction condo in Buckhead and came to the sales center to pick out fixtures and finishes, he was able to talk the team into leasing, and eventually selling, the building to SwissWatchExpo.
 
“We’re very hands-on how we’re running the business,” Tutunikov said. A few months ago, the company hired John Safran, a specialist in helping family-run businesses grow, to serve as chief revenue officer. “I actually think the next five years are even more of an opportunity than before because what I didn’t really hear much about in 2018, 2019 was people scared about authenticity,” Tutunikov said. “Now, consumers are realizing that the fakes are getting better, and you can’t trust most sellers online or even your local sellers unless they have the capability to open up every watch. And who has that? Very few people.”
 
Victoria chimed in: “It’s not only about fakes. It’s about ‘Franken-watches.’ It could be a wrong movement or the wrong crown or the bracelet has two aftermarket links. A few years ago, we had a guy sell us a 3-year-old Nautilus with a 1995 movement inside. We were shocked this thing was even working.
 
“We don’t cut corners,” she continued. “If the watch was posted yesterday, meaning it was serviced yesterday, and we sell it today, we pull it and it goes back to the watchmakers.”

Credit: robbreport.com