Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement via Instagram on Tuesday (26 Aug) and the internet has had a lot to say about her vintage-inspired ring.
The watch on her wrist has also been a huge topic. The singer is not officially paid by Cartier for endorsements, as she maintains no official brand partnerships, but her impact on watch sales for the brand is about to explode after wearing a discontinued Cartier Santos Demoiselle.
The Instaphere was already buzzing about the watch after Swift wore the same timepiece during an announcement about her new album, New Heights, on Kelce’s podcast.
Anybody on the mailing lists of pre-owned watch specialists will already be receiving encouragement to shop for the Taylor Swift look with them. If they do not have the watch in stock, they will find it for you, they urge.
The Cartier Santos Demoiselle, or similar smaller watches in yellow gold, have been fashionable for the past two years, and have dragged the entire industry away from oversized statement pieces.
Quartz watches have also lost their stigma as men and women consider timepieces as jewellery and choose slim style and glittering design over horological heft.
The quartz-based Cartier Santos Demoiselle mini ticks every box with its yellow gold case and bracelet teamed with a timeless Cartier square dial framed by diamonds.
How much is Taylor Swift’s Cartier worth?
Cartier discontinued the reference around a decade ago, and it is impossible to find an example for sale on any of the major pre-owned watch platforms today.
That makes valuing the watch challenging, even before factoring in the Taylor Swift Effect, which is significant enough to impact the GDP of countries when her stage tour swings into town.
Sotheby’s sold this example of the Santos Demoiselle in March for $19,050.
The most recent auction sale of the piece was in March this year when Sotheby’s sold a 2006 Reference 2699 Santos Demoiselle in diamond-set yellow gold for $19,050, smashing the pre-sale estimate of $7,000 to $14,000.
How much Cartier and its global network of retail partners will benefit from the Swift-Kelce engagement pictures will be measured by marketing agencies tracking the value of “earned media”, a term for unpaid content that connects with its audience.
The first measure is obviously Swift’s Instagram account, where we learn that the engagement announcement has been liked by no fewer than 28 million people, one tenth of the 280 million who follow her account.
Another data point comes from the rise and fall of Google searches when people are looking for information about the Taylor Swift watch.
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.
Google Trends provides this information, so we looked at two searches: “Taylor Swift Watch” and “Taylor Swift Cartier”.
The graph above shows the biggest spike for both searches began on August 12, the day that Taylor Swift announced her new album on her now-fiancé’s podcast. The top of that spike was on August 13 and returned to a more normal baseline a week later.
Last night’s announcement by the happy couple has caused an even steeper rise in searches, and is likely to peak at an even higher level than the album announcement appearance of the Cartier watch.
Cartier is performing better than its rivals when it comes to secondary market prices, another indicator for the health of a brand and whether demand is exceeding supply.
Most brands have seen prices at unauthorised dealers continuing to fall this year after peaking in 2022.
However, Cartier is one of just five brands that saw secondary market prices rise, quarter-on-quarter, in the three months from April to June this year.
Average prices for Cartier were flat in Q2 compared to a year earlier as well. Every other major brand has seen prices fall over the past 12 months, according to a study by Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts.
The news is not all good for Cartier, or for dealers that expect a windfall from the publicity that Swift is bringing to the brand.
Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts also looks at the level of inventory on sale on the secondary market (a notoriously difficult figure to nail down, but worthwhile to monitor over time).
Here, Cartier looks weaker, with the total value of available inventory on the secondary market for the brand rising sharply over the past 12 months.
On average, Cartier watches can be bought on the secondary market for 28.2% less than at authorised retailers, the study finds.
That is considerably worse than the big three, Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, whose watches trade at or above retail prices on the secondary market, but much better than rival brands from the large publicly traded groups. Omega watches trade at 35% under retail, IWC sees 37% discounts and Tudor is undercut by 40%.