Zoe Abelson’s Instagram feed, @watchgirloffduty, typically shows her posing in to-die-for locations with even more to-die-for wrist candy, like a limited edition Rolex Oyster Perpetual with a blue enamel face or a Patek Philippe Aquanaut 5060A from the 1990s.

But Ms. Abelson’s post from Hong Kong in November 2020 diverged from the usual format. Yes, she was wearing a knockout Audemars Piguet stainless steel Royal Oak. Sharing the limelight, however, was a decidedly less glamorous wristband: the white plastic GPS tracker that, at the time, the government was requiring residents to wear during their mandatory 14-day hotel quarantines.

“I’m a very calm, like, even-keeled person. I don’t have anxiety. I don’t get worked up,” the 32-year-old said from her current home in New York City. “But the first day that I woke up in my hotel, I had a massive panic attack, just thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t leave this room.’”

For Ms. Abelson, that difficult period was the catalyst for some big personal and career moves.

In April 2021, she resigned as senior sales consultant in Hong Kong for the pre-owned watch dealer WatchBox and returned to her native New York (she grew up in Westchester County). In June, she opened her own luxury watch dealership, called Graal — the French word for “grail,” a term used by vintage watch fanatics to describe what Ms. Abelson called “the end game watch, the ultimate desire.” She said the business grossed $4.5 million in sales during its first six months.

It could be argued that leaving Hong Kong and the security of a company job was a risky move, but Ms. Abelson’s 11 years in watches has been built on unusual choices. “She’s the only woman out there in that space,” said Isabella Proia, a watch specialist at Phillips auction house in New York. “To go out and do your own thing alone, with your own capital, Zoe has guts.”

Hong Kong has long been known as a watch city: For years it was the Swiss industry’s largest export market, occupying a larger than usual space in luxury consumer culture. When WatchBox, founded in 2017 in Philadelphia, sent Ms. Abelson there in 2018 to help open its first overseas office, she quickly realized that high-end buyers and collectors in Asia were not comfortable with pre-owned watches. “Culturally people thought they were taboo,” she said. “They didn’t want to buy a watch where they didn’t know the history of the previous owner.”

During her three and a half years in Hong Kong, that perspective changed. WatchBox opened a private retail lounge near the luxury watch row of Queen’s Road Central in the city’s prime business district. “There were always a lot of secondhand dealers in the Hong Kong market, in little shops in Mong Kok or Tsim Sha Tsui,” Ms. Abelson said. “But we were the first to bring a white glove service to that market.” And well-financed players such as Watchfinder in Hong Kong, Hodinkee in New York and Watchmaster in Europe established themselves in secondary market sales, too.

Although a combination of political unrest and the pandemic toppled Hong Kong from its top export spot in 2020, Ms. Abelson said it was her biggest sales year. “After a few months of Covid,” she said, “I really saw a lot of collectors saying, ‘I am so bored,’ and bury themselves in their collections.”

But even though she was happy in Hong Kong (and at her former employer, with whom she still trades referrals), Ms. Abelson’s love for travel (“It’s my other passion, after watches”) hit the wall of Hong Kong’s strict quarantine restrictions, which at one point required 21 days of hotel isolation for anyone arriving from countries designated “high risk.”

“I felt trapped in Hong Kong,” she said. “I also felt like I had hit my high mark. I was at my peak. I just felt like, all right — I need to figure this out.”

A willingness to follow her instincts had guided Ms. Abelson ever since she dropped out of Florida International University in 2011 to take a full-time job at Antiquorum auction house. (A family friend had landed her a summer job there answering phones and she stayed on, finishing college part time in New York.) “I wasn’t really into watches,” Ms. Abelson said. “I wanted to be a lawyer in the hotel industry. But then I got fascinated by the trade. I’d see an old steel watch selling for more than an all-gold one, and think, “What is going on?”

Shannon Beck, WatchBox’s vice president of e-commerce, spotted Ms. Abelson when she was at another watch auction house, Auctionata, and hired her in 2017. “As a woman in a male-dominated industry, I’m committed to opening the doors for other women,” Ms. Beck said. “And Zoe was special. You rarely find someone who is smart, and street smart too. And she was already forward-looking — she had an Instagram presence in 2015, before almost anyone else.” (The account now has about 12,500 followers.)

In a way, Ms Abelson’s career path is a paradigm for the recent and rapid rise of the vintage watch trade. Pre-owned is now the Cinderella segment of the watch market, with 8 percent to 10 percent annual growth. In its 2021 watches and jewelry report, McKinsey & Company predicted that the sector, which accounted for $18 billion in sales in 2019, would reach $29 billion to $32 billion by 2025.

With market research like that in mind, Ms. Abelson had brainstormed her next chapter: “I wanted to create a start-up, a membership-based watch trading app for collectors.” Once she got back to New York, however, things changed. “Being away for so long, I was like, well I need to put in some time here with family and friends and catch up,” she said.

“Catching up” for Ms. Abelson, a passionate collector herself, meant connecting in person with a long list of vintage watch aficionados in the United States and Europe whom she had met online and via social media while in Hong Kong. “In the watch community, there are bubbles,” she said. “Even though it’s a small community, it seems like they’re all these little niches, that perhaps we’re not talking to each other.” She started three WhatsApp groups, two for watch enthusiasts interested in independent watch brands and in what the industry calls “neo-vintage,” watches from the 1990s and 2000s.

The third was a group reserved for women in the watch world. “I really wanted to create a space, somewhere without judgment, where women can ask questions and not feel daunted by, you know, watch nerds,” she said. Within 24 hours, 100 women had joined, from 20 countries.

When Ms. Abelson took a long-awaited European trip last summer, “I had women in the watch trade in every city to look up, have coffee with,” she said. “Collectors, women in the industry. It made me feel like I was really a global citizen in the world of watches.”

As her network expanded, demand for her services as a dealer followed. The watch trader formerly trapped by quarantines and travel restrictions is now flying back and forth to Europe for deals — and to the West Coast, where she is thinking of opening a second base: “Every time I go to L.A., whether it be for pleasure or for business, I gain multiple new clients. There’s definitely a thriving vintage market in California, and not a lot of dealers there.”

The private membership group watch app is still in development while Ms. Abelson chases her clients’ grails — and, when she has the time, her own: “The F.P. Journe Calendrier with a black mother-of-pearl dial. Classic yet modern. All the little details in the piece. Mechanically impressive. Rare. It’s everything a watch should be.”