Watch Specialist; Remy Julia, Director at Christie’s Dubai DIFC Head of Middle East-India- Africa , explains how the pandemic has increased Christie’s online communication and sales channels.

Mr. Julia, during the lockdown what was it hard to read the time or has it become something so permeable we have track of?

On 15 March 2020 when Christie’s London went in full lockdown, we were well positioned due to 10 years of gained experience from holding online sales. Our first online-only sale was held in 2011 as part of the Elizabeth Taylor sale when we sold over 900 lots of her belongings, including watches.

Even though the company had to push forward its e-commerce strategy and whilst doing so the teams also developed strongly the private sale sector. These two transaction channels had to compensate for not being able to hold physical auctions. And I believe for the watch sector we achieved strong results online which stand at +US$30 million and for private sales it was the strongest year ever for the company at an overall total of US$1,5 billion transactions. 

What did you do the most when you were home?

Business getting and having deep and meaningful conversations with my long standing clients. The pandemic allowed us to build even stronger relationships with our clients as we were all at home and had more time to spend on things outside the daily business. Clients had additional time to think about their watches collections and we were available to curate and evaluate their existing collection and evolve it another level.

We also engaged with our community by holding different zoominars and making our online tools more relevant for our collectors.

Do you miss being in office, in auction rooms, in touch with buyers, collectors and surrounded by beautiful designs?

Now that we are starting to get back to the office you noticed what you have missed over the past year. But even though we were able to built new and strengthened existing relationships over this period of time and virtually we travelled the world every day to connect with colleagues, collectors, first time buyers and other members of the industry!

As Christie’s watches maintained its worldwide sales calendar, we were very quickly back to “business as usual” and under these new circumstances we were able to set 11 new world auction records for watches and sold 5 watches over $ 1 million.