Back in October, I wrote about my buying experience with Chronext. It’s an online secondary market platform that connects authorized dealers from around the world with customers, often allowing for prices much lower than MSRP. Chronext sources and inspects all the watches it sells before shipping them to buyers around the world.

Since Chronext is a German-based company, this meant that my order had to go through U.S. customs. I later received a tariff invoice from U.S. customs, asking me to pay a small additional fee for importing the watch. Fair enough: the tariff was equal to about 3% of the purchase price, relatively immaterial to an already large purchase.

But, what was interesting is that the invoice came with the “watch worksheet” that customs filled out upon the watch’s U.S. arrival.

I bought a Nomos Club (Ref. 709) from Chronext, which sells for $1,800 on Nomos, but Chronext sells for $980. For some context: it’s a 36mm manually-wound watch in a stainless steel case that comes on a suede leather strap. From U.S. customs, here was the breakdown of the watch’s total declared value (as filled out by Chronext):

• Movement: $544 (56%)

• Case: $346 (35%)

• Strap: $90 (9%)

• Total value = $980

So there you have it. With this particular watch, at least, the movement is 56% of its declared value. I’d be curious to see what this looks like with different watches. For example, how much of the value comes from the case when its made of precious metal? How different would the breakdown be, for example, if the movement were an off-the-shelf ETA ebauche?

When I’m looking to make a new watch purchase, this is probably about how I value a watch’s component parts — 50% movement, 50% everything else. But, everyone’s value calculation is a little bit different.