WHAT WE LOVE:

What do Rolex Collectors and 5-year-olds have in common? Both are obsessed with stickers. Rolex very carefully applies stickers to all of their new watches to maintain their 'newness' prior to sale. Nowadays it is a matter of Rolex policy to remove these stickers prior to letting the watch leave the showroom so that secondhand dealers such as myself cannot represent these watches as 'New Old Stock'. 

I have a special feeling towards the Black GMT Master II as it was the first Rolex model I ever sold. A Korean Airlines pilot wanted a discount from the $11,600 RRP in 2016 and as a freshly anointed 'watch dealer' I cheerfully bounced across the showroom to relay this request to my manager. He graciously informed me that this was not a model that typically required discounting in order to sell, but I was so eager to sell my first Rolex that he allowed a small discount so that I could get my first Rolex sale on the board. 

In the intervening 7 years, Rolex has become harder and harder to purchase at retail, let alone a discount from retail, and models such as this which are fully stickered are vanishingly rare in the market. Seeing a box fresh example of this watch might have made me a little nostalgic for the earliest days of my professional watch-selling days when the first and possibly the only time a customer could walk into an Authorised Dealer and buy a Rolex Sports Model out of the window. All of this reminiscing makes me wonder if, in the giddy process of selling my first-ever Rolex, I removed the stickers or not.  

FIVEFORTYFIVE SIX MONTHS WARRANTY