About
Both questions matter more than usual on a site like this, so they are answered first and in plain terms.
GrayWatches is written by Lungelo Ncanana, from Durban, South Africa. Watch enthusiast. Digital marketer and media buyer with more than seven years in the industry, and a background in forex and the financial markets.
That second part matters more than it sounds. Seven years buying media and building campaigns is how I know exactly how a discount gets manufactured: inflate the list price, advertise the gap, let the customer do the arithmetic wrong. I have written those ads and paid to put them in front of people, which is why the first thing I check now is whether the “was” price was ever real.
The markets background is why the rand figures here include your bank’s cut. Anyone who has traded currency knows the quoted rate is not the rate you get: there is a spread, and somebody is earning it. Most price comparisons written for South African buyers ignore that entirely. Ours does not, which is why our landed numbers run higher than the ones you will see elsewhere, and closer to what actually leaves your account.
I am not a watchmaker and I do not work in the watch trade. What I do is check prices properly, which turns out to be the thing nobody was doing. Grey-market retailers advertise 40–70% discounts, and when I started pricing individual references against the open market, the discounts kept disappearing. The first retailer I checked ran above market on all eight references I tested.
That is the whole reason this site exists. Not opinions about watches. Numbers you can check yourself in about a minute.
Every price is dated because every price moves. If one is stale or wrong, tell me and I will correct it and say so.
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through one, the retailer pays me a commission and you pay exactly the same price. Where a page carries one, it says so on that page, not just here.
What that does not buy. No retailer has been given, or will be given, a better assessment for paying more. The commission rate is never a reason to recommend somewhere.
You can check that claim against the site itself. The Tissot PRX page tells you outright that the retailer I earn from is not the keenest price available, and sends you to check the reference number elsewhere before ordering. The retailer review names the reference where its own pricing runs 54% above market. If the recommendations only ever pointed at the highest commission, none of that would be there.
The reasoning is not charitable, it is practical. A watch buyer researches for weeks and cross-checks everything. A site that shades the truth to earn one commission gets caught on the first check and is never opened again.
If a price is wrong, a specification is off, or a retailer has changed something, say so and I will fix it. Corrections are logged on the page rather than quietly edited.
Contact: indexrapid.com@indexrapid.com