Rolex, every mention

Rolex (Audio) · Acquired Feb 24, 2025 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 57:06 David Rosenthal I don't know what Rolex is.
• ▶ 57:11 David Rosenthal And even though Rolex had this history, probably had the best product, it just didn't matter.
• ▶ 57:29 David Rosenthal You know, even really in many ways, the Rolex product.
• ▶ 57:32 David Rosenthal Rolex probably kept better time than competitors.
• ▶ 57:37 Ben Gilbert They were QA certified.
• ▶ 58:13 David Rosenthal You know, you go look at the watch market now, Rolexes, all the other brands, they're like, waterproof to, fifty-seven thousand million meters.
• ▶ 59:13 Ben Gilbert I like where you're going, David, because there's basically three big pillars of what makes a Rolex a Rolex, or frankly, what makes a good mechanical watch a good mechanical watch.
• ▶ 59:27 David Rosenthal Oyster.
• ▶ 59:34 David Rosenthal Well, Oyster is Rolex marketing speak for waterproof.
• ▶ 59:34 David Rosenthal Well, Oyster is Rolex marketing speak for waterproof.
• ▶ 1:00:03 David Rosenthal You'll notice that your Rolex does not say Hermetic.
• ▶ 1:00:52 David Rosenthal And Rolex gets into this too.
• ▶ 1:00:55 David Rosenthal They buy cases from Baumgartner and they make these Hermetic watches.
• ▶ 1:01:32 Ben Gilbert And mind you, Rolex has been dying to solve this problem.
• ▶ 1:01:35 Ben Gilbert They had at least three failed attempts to create a waterproof seal in-house.
• ▶ 1:02:02 David Rosenthal So he goes to the two guys that invented this and he buys the patent and makes it exclusive to Rolex.
• ▶ 1:02:17 Ben Gilbert And when I was reading this, I thought, oh, man, Rolex didn't actually invent the Oyster case.
• ▶ 1:02:17 Ben Gilbert And when I was reading this, I thought, oh, man, Rolex didn't actually invent the Oyster case.
• ▶ 1:02:22 Ben Gilbert They just watched someone else do it.
• ▶ 1:02:25 Ben Gilbert They saw that this was absolutely essential, and Wilsdorf jumped right on the opportunity and said, who cares who came up with the idea?
• ▶ 1:02:41 David Rosenthal And Rolex were not watchmakers until they finally bought Agler in 2004.
• ▶ 1:03:36 Ben Gilbert The hermetic seal on the all-oyster watches going forward, and of course it's named the oyster because oysters seal when they're closed.
• ▶ 1:04:03 David Rosenthal So in July, 1926, Hans and Rolex goes and registers the product name Oyster.
• ▶ 1:04:03 David Rosenthal So in July, 1926, Hans and Rolex goes and registers the product name Oyster.
• ▶ 1:04:15 David Rosenthal Everybody in the whole world needs to know the Rolex name, needs to know that we are the exclusive owners of the Oyster system.
• ▶ 1:04:15 David Rosenthal Everybody in the whole world needs to know the Rolex name, needs to know that we are the exclusive owners of the Oyster system.
• ▶ 1:04:23 David Rosenthal He prepares to spend, in Britain alone, annual expenditures of over 10,000 pounds just on advertising for the Oyster models.
• ▶ 1:04:40 Ben Gilbert He's not just marketing Rolex.
• ▶ 1:04:41 Ben Gilbert This is Rolex, the only watch that has Oyster.
• ▶ 1:04:41 Ben Gilbert This is Rolex, the only watch that has Oyster.
• ▶ 1:04:46 David Rosenthal Oyster technology.
• ▶ 1:07:02 David Rosenthal While wearing a new Rolex Oyster model.
• ▶ 1:07:06 David Rosenthal And, uh, what Rolex doesn't talk about to these days is a footnote to history of, it wasn't actually on her wrist.
• ▶ 1:07:26 David Rosenthal This is still featured prominently on the Rolex website today.
• ▶ 1:08:33 David Rosenthal So Hans does this and proclaims the success and announcement of the world's first waterproof wristwatch, fully enclosed in its own case without a second hermetic seal around it, and the triumphant launch of the Rolex Oyster.
• ▶ 1:08:51 Ben Gilbert So this is how Rolex tells the story.
• ▶ 1:09:11 Ben Gilbert The big words are Rolex Oyster, and it says Rolex introduces, for the first time, the greatest triumph in watchmaking.
• ▶ 1:09:11 Ben Gilbert The big words are Rolex Oyster, and it says Rolex introduces, for the first time, the greatest triumph in watchmaking.
• ▶ 1:09:29 Ben Gilbert Then there's four sketches of the different watch faces you can get of the Rolex Oyster.
• ▶ 1:09:54 Ben Gilbert Either Rolex hadn't found their groove in advertising yet, or maybe people just read a lot more words back then, but if you put this up today, our TikTokified brains would be like, don't care, next.
• ▶ 1:11:18 David Rosenthal The first brand ambassador of Rolex.
• ▶ 1:11:46 David Rosenthal Rolex still was primarily a ladies product.
• ▶ 1:11:51 David Rosenthal But if you look at their product catalogs, really up until World War II, ladies models outnumbered men's models two to one.
• ▶ 1:12:10 David Rosenthal But it's interesting that they were really women's focused.
• ▶ 1:12:15 David Rosenthal And even to this day, I believe the market of buyers for Rolex watches is basically fifty-fifty, men and women.
• ▶ 1:12:25 Ben Gilbert I never would have guessed that, especially because much of my research was lurking on the Rolex and watches subreddits, which are a very particular type of dude.
• ▶ 1:12:53 Ben Gilbert It's amazing that Rolex's history indexes so heavily to women, and that even today, they move a lot of units to women, even though that's not where I come across Rolex in my day to day.
• ▶ 1:13:07 David Rosenthal But it's one of the really unique things about Rolex,
• ▶ 1:13:20 David Rosenthal Whereas Rolex, yeah, it really is fifty-fifty.
• ▶ 1:13:26 David Rosenthal That's the oyster story, and that really is a huge watershed moment for Rolex and for the wristwatch industry.
• ▶ 1:13:26 David Rosenthal That's the oyster story, and that really is a huge watershed moment for Rolex and for the wristwatch industry.
• ▶ 1:13:35 Ben Gilbert I'm not sure they'd come up with that terminology yet, but this is something that they would lean heavily into as their means of marketing in the future.
• ▶ 1:13:44 Ben Gilbert They would hate you calling it a brand ambassador.
• ▶ 1:13:47 David Rosenthal It's Rolex partner, is what they call it.
• ▶ 1:13:53 Ben Gilbert That they wanted to sort of invent and have to themselves, and it's different than influencer marketing.
• ▶ 1:14:22 David Rosenthal Oyster was huge, but it had a problem.
• ▶ 1:15:37 David Rosenthal It's actually because it's tied to the oyster and the screw-down mechanism, if you forget to screw your crown back down, you lose the element-proofness of the oyster.
• ▶ 1:17:53 David Rosenthal So back to Oyster and leading into the need for self-winding and the perpetual element of Rolex, if you can create a self-winding wristwatch, well, all of a sudden, the element-proofness of the Oyster works fine for everybody because…
• ▶ 1:17:53 David Rosenthal So back to Oyster and leading into the need for self-winding and the perpetual element of Rolex, if you can create a self-winding wristwatch, well, all of a sudden, the element-proofness of the Oyster works fine for everybody because…
• ▶ 1:18:33 Ben Gilbert Ok, before going into the nuance of how Rolex's particular self-winding mechanism works, I think this is a good time to explain how mechanical watches work at all, what the key components are, and frankly-
• ▶ 1:25:04 Ben Gilbert And you know, you end up with fancy names and proprietary things that Rolex makes in the far future called a paracrom hairspring that has these amazing renders and animations and videos of how it works.
• ▶ 1:26:52 Ben Gilbert And because jewels can be really hard minerals, and you don't want these things to wear out, and so when you're slapping something back and forth six times per second, you want to make sure that, I mean, most Rolex watches don't need to go…
• ▶ 1:27:47 David Rosenthal Rolex watch.
• ▶ 1:28:56 David Rosenthal He was trying to create a waterproof system just like Rolex was.
• ▶ 1:29:37 David Rosenthal So, he invents this system, and just like his Swiss counterparts who invented what became the Oyster system under Rolex, he patents it.
• ▶ 1:29:37 David Rosenthal So, he invents this system, and just like his Swiss counterparts who invented what became the Oyster system under Rolex, he patents it.
• ▶ 1:31:04 David Rosenthal So, Hans, of course, in Rolex, sees this.
• ▶ 1:31:08 David Rosenthal He knows he needs an automatic system for the Oyster to really unlock the potential of the product and fully break the wristwatch
• ▶ 1:31:51 David Rosenthal So finally the door is now open for Hans and Rolex to complete the product here.
• ▶ 1:32:01 Ben Gilbert There was an article published at this time that said you could get a Rolex for as little as 25 dollars.
• ▶ 1:32:15 Ben Gilbert Rolex's top of their line today is a lot more than 18,000 dollars, and the bottom of their line is a lot more than 450 dollars.
• ▶ 1:32:22 Ben Gilbert But that gives you a sense of the type of wealth you would need in order to purchase a Rolex at this point in history.
• ▶ 1:32:37 David Rosenthal Rolex at this point is not a luxury brand.
• ▶ 1:33:01 David Rosenthal So here we are in the early thirties, after a couple years of work, Rolex finally cracks it and patents their own
• ▶ 1:33:47 David Rosenthal One of the initial marketing points for the rotor system, the perpetual system that Rolex comes out with, is the silentness of, they call it the silent self-winding system.
• ▶ 1:35:09 Ben Gilbert And the other fun thing about this is it is legitimately an invention by Rolex.
• ▶ 1:35:14 Ben Gilbert Oyster was licensed.
• ▶ 1:35:19 Ben Gilbert This is the first time we're really seeing Rolex R&D figure out some brand new breakthrough contribution to the watch world.
• ▶ 1:35:35 David Rosenthal Rolex technology, and really all mechanical wristwatch technology of quality from this point forward.
• ▶ 1:35:40 David Rosenthal You've got the accuracy, the chronometer, observatory certified, you've got waterproofness, element-proofness via the Oyster, and now you've got self-winding with the Perpetual, Oyster Perpetual.
• ▶ 1:36:31 David Rosenthal This is the gold and steel mix that is now just an iconic Rolex look.
• ▶ 1:36:46 David Rosenthal Rolex contracts them out.
• ▶ 1:37:00 David Rosenthal Was a new look, shall we say, from Rolex at this time.
• ▶ 1:37:06 Ben Gilbert Rolex and just most tool watches have fluted bezels.
• ▶ 1:37:37 Ben Gilbert 1931 was a weird year because Rolex was just starting to figure out this perfect product mix, and at the same time, the world is heaved into a Great Depression, and the British pound is devalued, so exports out of Britain drop by…
• ▶ 1:37:54 Ben Gilbert Crisis happens, so Rolex is looking to internationally diversify.
• ▶ 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.
• ▶ 1:38:46 David Rosenthal You think Submariner, yeah.
• ▶ 1:39:09 Ben Gilbert This is when Rolex goes to Agler and says, hey, we want to take all of your production.
• ▶ 1:39:19 Ben Gilbert This is where I think Rolex may have bought the shares back from Egler, but again, we don't know and we'll never know, because no one at Rolex will ever talk about that.
• ▶ 1:39:26 Ben Gilbert And this is also when Egler adds Rolex to its name.
• ▶ 1:39:31 David Rosenthal The Egler manufacturer of Rolex watches.
• ▶ 1:39:37 David Rosenthal At the beginning of the war in 1940, remember Rolex is in Switzerland,
• ▶ 1:39:55 David Rosenthal And so Rolex and all the other Swiss watchmakers are like, well, shoot.
• ▶ 1:40:19 David Rosenthal So, do you know what Rolex did in Italy during this time?
• ▶ 1:40:38 David Rosenthal And so this Italian retail partner comes to Rolex and is like, hey, we got a contract for dive watches.
• ▶ 1:40:45 David Rosenthal And Rolex is like, yeah, sure, we can do that.
• ▶ 1:40:51 Ben Gilbert Which is funny because this is like a decade and a half before the Submariner.
• ▶ 1:40:56 David Rosenthal This is the first dive watch that Rolex makes.