Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** This article examines the latest developments in the watchmaking and jewelry sector, highlighting key trends and market shifts. Our coverage aims to provide clarity on the business dynamics shaping this industry.
Maty Jewelry of Besançon Relaunches by Betting on Second-Hand Market
Published on September 12, 2024 by Edwige Prompt
On August 1st, the jewelry and fine jewelry brand Maty acquired the main assets of Cresus, a watchmaker specializing in the purchase and sale of pre-owned luxury watches.
Thanks to the recent acquisition of watchmaker Cresus, the renowned jewelry brand strengthens its position in the pre-owned watch market. After difficult years, Maty has moved forward by expanding its store network.
This summer, the jewelry distributor Maty, established since 1951 in Besançon (Doubs), announced the acquisition of the main assets of Cresus, a watchmaker specializing in the purchase and sale of pre-owned Swiss luxury watches (Rolex, Breitling, Tag Heuer…). The acquired perimeter includes the brand, its e-commerce site, and its stores in Lyon and Bordeaux. Employing around thirty employees with a turnover of €10 million in 2023, this Lyon-based company founded in 1993 was placed under judicial reorganization last spring. Its three other stores in Paris, Lille, and Aix-en-Provence are excluded from the purchase offer.
Effective since August 1st, the acquisition follows a commercial partnership established in 2021 between the two companies: Cresus had opened seven “shop-in-shop” within the jewelry stores of the famous Besançon brand. In the coming months, five new “corners” are to be set up in Maty stores in Dijon, Tours, Toulouse, Grenoble, and Paris, Place de l’Opéra.
The acquisition perimeter includes two of Cresus’s five stores, including the historic store in central Lyon, the brand’s headquarters.
The Besançon distributor thus strengthens its positions in a market that has become strategic for it: the second-hand market.
With 1,500 referenced products, the sale of pre-owned jewelry and watches already represents “5 to 10%” of its turnover, emphasizes André Ségura, CEO of Gemafi, the holding company 100% owned by the children of Gérard Mantion, the founder of Maty.
To develop the sale of pre-owned jewelry and watches, which already represents between 5 and 10% of its turnover, Maty relies on its integrated after-sales service.
The executive, former number one at Go Sport, makes the development of this segment “a strategic axis.”
To repair and authenticate items it buys back from customers, the company can rely on the expertise of its integrated after-sales service workshops.
At the helm since the end of 2020, André Ségura has worked to revive a group in great difficulty, which had been weakened by changes in consumption patterns and competition from shopping center chains. He immediately began implementing a social plan involving about twenty layoffs, with the closure of five stores, the least profitable, out of a total of 47.
In spring 2021, after the sale of its Besançon-based direct marketing and mailing subsidiary Gem Services to Alsatian company 3MA, Maty “refocused on its core business: jewelry,” while modifying its business model.
The catalog that made Maty successful for decades now represents only a marginal share of its sales.
Former head of the Go Sport group, André Ségura has led for four years Gemafi, the family holding company that controls Maty, the SFM manufacturing plant, and the jewelry after-sales service EBS acquired in 2023.
After its installation last March in a shopping center in Blagnac, near Toulouse, the jeweler now has 40 stores in France: 35 branches and, as a novelty, five affiliated stores.
In this formula, distinct from traditional franchising, an independent investor finances the store’s capital and layout, while Maty handles the inventory.
This partnership system was set up on the initiative of André Ségura, who had already successfully experimented with it within the Go Sport group for the Courir shoe brand:
It is mainly intended for medium-sized towns, such as Pontarlier in the upper Doubs, where the very first “affiliated” store opened in 2022.
Gemafi also oversees, in Besançon, the SFM manufacturing plant, presented as the “French leader in diamond jewelry,” as well as the B2B jewelry after-sales service EBS acquired in 2023. The whole group employs 500 people, including about 300 in the capital of Franche-Comté.
According to its executive, it achieves a cumulative turnover of €100 million.
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Photos provided by the company.