Omega, every mention

Rolex (Audio) · Acquired Feb 24, 2025 · 40 mentions

• ▶ 56:46 Ben Gilbert It's Omega, right?
• ▶ 1:38:29 Ben Gilbert I will say very interestingly, in 1932, Omega released a waterproof watch, which is, I don't know, half a decade after Rolex.
• ▶ 1:38:42 Ben Gilbert You hear dive watch, you think Rolex, but Omega had the first dive watch.
• ▶ 1:43:42 Ben Gilbert Omega was thriving in the forties, fifties, even into the sixties in the Swiss watch world.
• ▶ 1:57:56 David Rosenthal You mentioned Omega, but basically anybody else, certainly any other Swiss company, can make a perfectly on-parody watch to what Rolex can make at this point in time.
• ▶ 2:20:35 David Rosenthal For which standard issue from NASA is the Omega Speedmaster.
• ▶ 2:21:48 Ben Gilbert Yeah, because like you said, the, uh, Omega Speedmaster famously is the Moonwatch.
• ▶ 2:43:02 Ben Gilbert And I do think this was the very first sort of chip of what made Rolex a real challenger to Omega, who had been kind of the standard big Swiss watch brand.
• ▶ 2:43:17 Ben Gilbert Also, I know I keep harping on this Omega thing.
• ▶ 2:43:20 Ben Gilbert Omega was actually worn by the soldiers in the Boer War that Hans had recognized.
• ▶ 2:56:39 Ben Gilbert And interestingly, omega quartz.
• ▶ 3:09:32 Ben Gilbert There's the Omega story, then there's an unlikely corner of Swiss watchmaking with Blancpain, and then there's the auction houses.
• ▶ 3:09:44 Ben Gilbert So first is Omega.
• ▶ 3:09:46 Ben Gilbert They blew a lead in the ninth inning.
• ▶ 3:09:53 David Rosenthal Omega was also big.
• ▶ 3:09:57 Ben Gilbert So coming into the seventies, they just had their watch land on the moon, an Apollo 11.
• ▶ 3:10:37 Ben Gilbert So, over to Omega.
• ▶ 3:10:39 Ben Gilbert As late as 1977 in the Quartz Crisis, Omega is still the third largest watch brand in the world behind Seiko, the darling of the Quartz Revolution, and Timex, which was the volume player on the American side of Quartz.
• ▶ 3:10:51 Ben Gilbert So in many ways, they should have been Switzerland's most likely horse to ride this thing out.
• ▶ 3:10:57 Ben Gilbert But they reacted extremely poorly.
• ▶ 3:11:20 Ben Gilbert Instead of thinking, what are we uniquely best at in the world, and trying to lean into that, Omega thought this Quartz thing is, like, absolutely essential to get right.
• ▶ 3:12:12 Ben Gilbert So, the other thing that killed them is that they had these agencies locally, and so Omega would import their movements, and then the agency could design their own case to suit the local market.
• ▶ 3:13:28 Ben Gilbert So, to close the Omega story, this is crazy.
• ▶ 3:13:38 Ben Gilbert This is the first company to ever launch a dive watch before the Submariner, and they rushed into, here's how we fight the quartz crisis head on, when they were just not built to be a part of that at all.
• ▶ 3:13:50 Ben Gilbert So this is the place where we see the divide, where Rolex becomes Rolex and Omega doesn't become, you know, they make cool watches, but like, it's not the brand.
• ▶ 3:13:58 David Rosenthal They pay a lot of money to MGM to be in James Bond movies.
• ▶ 3:14:02 Ben Gilbert So, that's Rolex sitting on their hands, watching Omega, and going, ok, don't do that.
• ▶ 3:20:02 Ben Gilbert Ok, so we've got Omega what not to do, we've got Blancpain what to do at small scale with nothing to lose, and we've got the auction houses taking the used market, for lack of a better term, and sparking the new market.
• ▶ 3:30:50 David Rosenthal Ben, what you were talking about a little while back about what Omega did, where you had the core movement, but then you had different end models and cases and products in different regions around the world.
• ▶ 3:44:02 David Rosenthal Bouchere sells Omega.
• ▶ 3:44:23 David Rosenthal Sell Omega.
• ▶ 4:07:05 Ben Gilbert Cartier and Omega have 7.5% each.
• ▶ 4:15:41 Ben Gilbert The Swiss watch industry is something like thirty-five billion dollars wholesale before the retail markup, across all players, including the super high-end and Omega and Swatch and everyone else.
• ▶ 4:21:51 Ben Gilbert Hilariously, they just bought the building where Omega has their flagship store in Geneva.
• ▶ 4:21:57 Ben Gilbert So Omega makes a rent check out to Rolex every month.
• ▶ 4:53:53 Ben Gilbert Omega.
• ▶ 4:54:01 David Rosenthal Wait, how did Omega go deeper?
• ▶ 4:54:17 David Rosenthal What did they do, like, drill a hole in the ground at the bottom of the trench?
• ▶ 4:54:20 Ben Gilbert I think they found a deeper part of the trench or something.
• ▶ 4:54:23 Ben Gilbert I mean, this is just, this is the most classic, classic Omega versus Rolex thing in the world.