Vintage Watches Freddie Mercury's Seiko, '90s Breguet, And Have High-End Indies Gone Too High?

In an event spanning multiple sales at Sotheby's last week, more than 1,400 items from the estate of former Queen frontman Freddie Mercury were sold at auction. His piano and handwritten song lyrics headlined the sale, selling for over $1 million. But a simple quartz Seiko Pulsemeter from Mercury's estate had the pulse of at least a few bidders racing. 

A red Seiko Pulsemeter from 1982 with a £300–500 estimate ended up selling for £35,560. Without the Mercury connection, it's a quartz watch worth a couple hundred quid. The bright red Seiko is an alarm, chronograph, and pulsometer. Among the other wardrobe items and accessories from the always-flamboyant Mercury, it kind of fits in. Even so, after looking through some old images of Mercury, I can't find evidence that he wore his Pulsemeter. But even if he didn't wear it, owning an item from one of our greatest rockstars seems to have been enough to garner a monster result. 

This isn't the only timepiece from Mercury that got attention either. In the separate home goods sale, four Cartier desk clocks all sold for more than 10,000 pounds. Mercury's Tiffany mustache comb was the surprise hit of the auction, selling for more than £150,000, a seemingly perfect representation of the singer. 

Meanwhile, Queen guitarist Brian May called the auction of Mercury's estate "too sad" to even think about. In an Instagram post, May said he still thinks about his former bandmate, who died in 1991, nearly every day, and he found the auctioning off of some of his most personal items to the highest bidder difficult to grapple with. The items came from Mercury's close friend and former girlfriend Mary Austin, who also called the decision to sell Mercury's effects a tough decision.

While a Seiko watch and a few Cartier clocks might not rise to this level of importance, I hope that some of the more historically important items from Mercury's estate end up in public or museum hands – or at least are put on display – for all to appreciate. As more money flows into watches and watch auctions, I hope the future holds the same for history's most important watches – sadly, too many of the significant watches that have sold at auction over the past few years have disappeared into private hands, even if we know they're in safe hands or good collections. 

Separately, Sotheby's had an online-only auction out of New York that ended this week. An online auction in September isn't where we go for the heavy hitters, but it did offer a glimpse at where the market is, and the type of watches that auctions are consigning. There weren't many interesting vintage watches, but I wanted to discuss a few results.

First, the sale had a ton of '90s Breguet, including a trio of the Reference 3310 Classique Perpetual Calendar in three precious metals – yellow and pink gold, along with platinum. These are from the era of Daniel Roth's Breguet, when the master watchmaker was still on the payroll, tasked with interpreting Breguet's traditional pocket watches for the wrist. The 3310 is one such result – a perfectly asymmetrical design, just as Breguet himself might've made.

It's a beautiful example of traditional watchmaking from when brands didn't cut corners. The lugs are soldered onto a classic 36mm coin-edge case. The dial features at least four different guilloche patterns, which is much more time-intensive than the single pattern seen on Breguet's recently updated QP. It requires additional passes through the rose engine to complete this guilloche. The fact that modern Breguet has done away with this illustrates how special these watches were.

While this era of Breguet has gained popularity among collectors recently, prices are still reasonable. Each watch passed its high estimate, led by the platinum, which sold for $24,130. But, considering that a modern Breguet QP – which, for the reasons I mentioned, isn't as well made – costs $80,000, it doesn't sound so bad.

I'm not sure about the production numbers of these 3310s; Francois Bodet, the director of Breguet through the '70s and '80s once said Breguet only produced two or three perpetual calendars a year due to the 30 different people required to make just one. This seems like a drastically low estimate since it implies Breguet only made about 40 examples. These pop up more frequently than that, but it's still cool to see three metals lined up next to each other, perhaps all consigned from the same collector.

A few other great examples of '90s watchmaking also performed well – a Gérald Genta QP and an original Chopard L.U.C (a personal favorite) – but discussion of those is for another day.

The vintage Heuer market has been relatively slow, but an Abercrombie & Fitch Seafarer by Heuer still performed well at Sotheby's, selling for $20,320. I wanted to mention this reference 2444 Seafarer to contrast the result with a later 2447 Seafarer that sold at Christie's for a much higher $40,000 in June.

The 2444 Seafarer is a relatively uncommon find from the '50s, and the condition on this example seemed decent. While the case had been polished and the dial had some blemishes (notably, on the 3 o'clock subdial), there appeared to be no significant faults.

But, the 2447 Seafarer still went for twice the price in June. That's because the 2447 Seafarer is rarer and features a more interesting Carrera case, one of the defining silhouettes of vintage Heuer. Alpha Hands has documented the 2447 Seafarer and tracked less than 15 examples coming to market. The example Christie's sold wasn't perfect (e.g., relumed hands, but decently matched), but the dial was clean and the case sharp, so it's easy to understand how such a rare watch got to $40,000. (By the way, this was also in a slow Christie's auction where about 30 percent of lots went unsold – people were calling it a "bloodbath.")

Meanwhile, the 2444 Seafarer is simply "pretty good" and "pretty rare." The difference in price between these two similar watches illustrates the premium that a truly rare watch in good condition will get at auction compared to one that's just pretty good.

Smith has called his Series 2 a "game changer," the first production watch where he began to pursue improvements to the co-axial escapement his mentor George Daniels invented. The Series 2 Open Dials at ACM and Wristcheck also show an aesthetic evolution from Smith's earlier restrained work to something more avant-garde. From a watchmaking perspective, the Series 2 is also the first where Smith produced his watches entirely in-house according to the "Daniels Method."

But it's not all sunshine and million-dollar price tags. That Simplicity took a couple of months to sell, and even now, it's listed as "Reserved" (i.e., perhaps not yet paid for and sold). Meanwhile, Wristcheck is consigning its Series 2 Open Dial with a starting price of $1.15 million, but they're soliciting offers until September 22. This process seems to show some uncertainty in the market for high-end indies – it leaves open the door for them to get a higher price for the Roger Smith. I'd prefer to see a seller stick to a single asking price unless it's running a full, open, and transparent auction. Otherwise, there's too much room for funny business. Meanwhile, ACM has listed their Series 2 slightly lower, at about $975,000.

Are we reaching a plateau for these high-end indies on the secondary market? If so, it comes at the same time some buyers are starting to grumble about the price increases of these indies on the primary market. For years, Dufour's Simplicity had a five-figure price tag. Nowadays, they deliver above $600,000; Smith's watches have also nearly tripled over the past five years and deliver at a price similar to a Simplicity. For those who committed to buying these watches years ago when the price was a fraction of today's, it's been a difficult pill to swallow.

Price and pricing strategy, particularly for indies, is a tricky game. As some of these watchmakers are viewed as living artists, their work is valued accordingly. But for years, many of these watchmakers realized none of the value of their beautiful creations (for example, Dufour once said he never made money on his watches until 2010). Now that the market can bear higher prices, how much should prices be increased to reflect this? It's a question with no easy answer that implicates many issues around allocation, flipping, and markets that collectors are constantly discussing nowadays.