Stat of the Week

Valentine’s Day 2024 saw an estimated 50% decline in Watch and Jewelry sales on Tmall luxury flagship stores* versus 2023.

Behind the Stat:

💎 This year Valentine’s Day coincided with the Chinese New Year holidays – the net effect, less gifting, less purchasing. While we are only looking at online numbers, conversations from around the industry indicate that sales were also soft offline.

💎 It’s not that 2023 was especially good – 2023 saw roughly a similar performance as 2022 (remembering that February was before large scale lockdowns and market sentiment was still extremely positive at the time), so 2024 also represents a 50% drop versus 2022.

💎 Top seller Cartier dropped significantly – but its not just the Richemont powerhouse – Tasaki, Piaget and Chopard saw even more significant relative decreases versus the previous year.

💎 Baby Blue to the rescue? - Tiffany & Co.’s launch on the platform provided a potential boon to the sales, but still wasn’t enough to overcome market trends. However, the brand did rank fourth during the period between 1st Feb – 15th Feb showing that its starting to have an impact.

💎 Jewelry >>> Watches – In 2022 jewelry accounted for ~74% of the revenue between the two categories, in 2023 ~79%. In 2024 it accounted for nearly 88% of the revenue. Both categories declined but the pinch will be more on watches.

💎 No brands saw a YoY increase two years in a row - This highlights that it’s the market direction. Bulgari were somewhat of the outlier in their 2023 to 2024 performance, managing to triple their revenues on the platform. Coupled with strong marketing activation, they stand in good stead to be one of the forerunners in the category this year.

Moving Forward

💍Jewelry – even more pressure is on the remaining ‘love festivals’ of the year. 5.20 (which historically generates the least revenue of the three festivals) and QiXi (Chinese Valentine’s Day – which is the most important revenue generator of the three). If campaigns are not planned for these festivals, get planning!

🕐Watches – Much less importance is placed around Valentine’s Day for the category, but it is still interesting to see the relative decline. This is an overall market trend we are seeing – Watches and Wonders is the next big milestone to captivate the Chinese audience (which we showed last year can work across borders), but conversative projections are needed for the China watch market performance as a whole in 2024.

* Not including brands such as Pandora, Chow Tai Fook etc.