Richard Mille’s pre-owned watch partners join Sunday Times Rich List

The all-black facade of 90 Mount Street may be discreet, but it has become a major player in the watch world since it opened in late 2020. 

So much so that its co-owner and director, Tilly Harrison, has just entered the Sunday Times Rich List and is now worth £350 million. She joins it alongside her father and co-founder, Peter Harrison, who also owns 50% of Richard Mille EMEA through his company Redgrave Luxury.

It’s an achievement that’s built on the success of the pre-owned watch market during the Covid years. Demand for second-hand started growing before the pandemic hit in 2020, but subsequently reached fever pitch as certain Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Richard Mille watches sold for as much as five times their retail value during the Covid years.

Richard Mille was already popular with collectors, who lapped up the watchmaker’s earlier models in particular. “We began to receive more and more requests for pre-owned, discontinued, or difficult-to-obtain models and noticed that the more historical pieces were growing in importance and attracting interest from serious collectors,” Harrison told the Financial Times in 2021 about why they founded Ninety.

And so Ninety Watches & Jewellery was born at a fortuitous moment in watchmaking history: in 2022, Deloitte reckoned that the second-hand watch industry would be worth CHF 35 billion by 2030. Although the market has since cooled, pre-owned watch sales remain resilient in tricky macroeconomic times — and Richard Mille is still one of the strongest-performing brands out there. Most of its models hold or exceed their original retail value on the secondary market, with celebrity models like those with Rafael Nadal, Bubba Watson, and Pharrell Williams performing best at resale. 

And when the Richard Mille manufacture only releases 5,000 models a year, demand will always outstrip supply. Instead of expanding its volumes, it made sense for the watchmaker to monetise its stake in the secondhand market, and provide an authorised solution for customers looking to buy, sell and restore their Mille collection. 

Ninety Watches & Jewellery also set a trend, with its move into authorised pre-owned retail followed by Rolex in 2022, followed by Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and later IWC. The strategy of investing in pre-owned paid dividends for Richard Mille and its associates — and you just need to look at the Sunday Times Rich List for evidence of that.