Watch Scanner
iW: How long has Chrono24 been in existence?
Tim Stracke: The website was established in 2003, and my partners and I
took over the site in 2010. We were able to turn it into a real business at a
time when online business was starting to evolve. Today, we have close to
300 employees as our headquarters in Karlsruhe, Germany, and we also have
satellite offices in Berlin, Hong Kong, and New York that run Chrono24 as
a global business. Through this, we probably reach one out of every three
luxury watch lovers worldwide (including 9 million unique viewers every
month), providing them access to more than 470,000 watch listings from
over 100 countries. However, besides operating this company together, we
are also very enthusiastic about watches. The vast majority of our employees
owns at least one watch that means a lot to them – altogether, we have quite
a versatile watch collection.
When you took it over in 2010 – what changed?
For the first seven years, Chrono24 was pretty much a classifieds site where
you could find watches and contact the seller, leaving the transaction entirely
between buyer and seller. We converted this into a transactional marketplace,
investing a massive amount of energy into make the transaction process
secure. Now, the buyer transfers payment to our escrow account, and we
make sure that the buyer is happy before forwarding payout to the seller.
We also offer a lot of additional services around the purchasing process.
We have a magazine, as well as a lot of data you can use to easily compare
prices. One of our more interesting features is the Chrono24 Watch Collection,
which enables users to upload their watches and track their watch portfolio
like they would their stocks.
In addition to this, we recently added two new functions to our app: The
first is our Virtual Showroom, an AR tool that allows you to try on 12 very
popular models virtually. These include the Rolex Submariner Date, Omega
Speedmaster Professional, Patek Philippe Nautilus, and Audemars Piguet
Royal Oak. Our latest addition is called the Watch Scanner, where you can
simply scan any watch with your camera to automatically identify it. From
there, you can add it to your Watch Collection or even create a listing.
How do you gather the data for estimated watch values in the Chrono24
Watch Collection?
We extrapolate the data from the tens of thousands of transactions made on
our platform every per month to establish a fairly accurate range of values.
For this calculation, we include actual sales prices from past sales, as well as
current listing prices on Chrono24. If we don’t have enough data to make a
valid estimation – for example, for rather rare reference numbers – we also
include listing prices from the past. This calculation is refreshed daily and
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