The company behind Cartier and Montblanc has repurchased and destroyed roughly $585 million (or £437 million) of its own watches over the past two years, according to The Guardian.
The Swiss company Richemont pulled this bizarre maneuver in order to prevent their watches from being sold at lower prices and by unauthorized resellers.
The buybacks have taken places across both European and Asian markets, as the company’s brass has become increasingly concerned about how the resale market produced by unsold stock could drive down prices and tarnish the watches’ luxury appeal. Described as an “exceptional circumstance” by Richemont’s then-CEO Richard Lepeu in 2016, the watch buyback program recycles the parts that once made up some of the world’s most famous watches.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
