Rolex, every mention

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

• ▶ 2:11:01 David Rosenthal Of course, James Bond wears Rolexes.
• ▶ 2:11:16 David Rosenthal Kind of like you might say Rolex itself is.
• ▶ 2:11:22 David Rosenthal So Sean Connery wears a Sub-Mariner in Dr.
• ▶ 2:12:16 Ben Gilbert If it was bid out, Rolex would decline to bid.
• ▶ 2:12:20 Ben Gilbert Because Rolex does not engage in, ugh, paid product placement.
• ▶ 2:12:24 David Rosenthal Well, that's, I assumed, the only way that Bond would stop wearing Rolex.
• ▶ 2:12:34 David Rosenthal Pierce Brosnan maybe is more of an Omega guy than a Rolex guy.
• ▶ 2:12:48 David Rosenthal There's no way that James Bond is not a Rolex guy.
• ▶ 2:13:57 David Rosenthal The point is, from 1962 until 1995, if you liked James Bond, and you wanted to have a little bit of James Bond in your life, too, then you wanted to wear a Submariner on your wrist.
• ▶ 2:14:25 David Rosenthal Uh, super fun little coda on the Submariner.
• ▶ 2:14:33 David Rosenthal Which I believe is still in the Rolex lineup to this day.
• ▶ 2:14:39 Ben Gilbert That's like a Submariner, but you can go real deep?
• ▶ 2:14:43 David Rosenthal So Rolex develops this in partnership with the French undersea exploration company COMEX.
• ▶ 2:14:51 David Rosenthal And there's this issue where helium would get trapped in the watch in the Submariner.
• ▶ 2:15:22 Ben Gilbert Okay, if you're already taking us from Submariner to Sea-Dweller, you gotta take us to Deep Sea Challenge.
• ▶ 2:15:40 Ben Gilbert But they design a watch and they said, well, what if we take this idea of originally the Submariner and then the Sea-Dweller, and we make this thing called the Deep Sea.
• ▶ 2:17:19 David Rosenthal That brings us to the GMT Master, the Greenwich Mean Time Master.
• ▶ 2:18:35 David Rosenthal And the way that they're going to do that is they're going to work with Rolex and develop a new professional watch for their pilots that can, for the first time, tell time simultaneously in two different time zones.
• ▶ 2:18:48 David Rosenthal So Rolex takes the failed Turnagraph, which isn't selling well, but has the rotating bezel, remember.
• ▶ 2:18:54 Ben Gilbert Bi-directional rotating bezel, importantly, because the Submariner is just one.
• ▶ 2:19:14 David Rosenthal and then they add in a fourth hand on the movement that moves at a 24 hour movement, and so all of a sudden, you can now, on one single watch face, keep track of two different time zones, and the GMT Master is born.
• ▶ 2:20:49 Ben Gilbert Like Rolex had a target in mind to beat, and that target was Omega, who was bigger.
• ▶ 2:21:02 David Rosenthal Not all of the Apollo astronauts chose to wear their standard-issue watches, so if you go to Rolex headquarters, there is an incredible signed picture from Apollo 13, you know, the Apollo 13 mission, the Tom Hanks movie, signed by…
• ▶ 2:21:27 David Rosenthal To my longtime friend, René Genere, who I believe was Rolex head of communications at the time, who enabled me to always be on time.
• ▶ 2:21:38 David Rosenthal So Jack, and I think maybe some of the other astronauts too, preferred GMT masters and wore their GMT masters during the Apollo missions.
• ▶ 2:21:53 Ben Gilbert In many ways, it's the big blemish in Rolex's whole strategy of being the brand for people who accomplished the greatest heights in human history.
• ▶ 2:22:16 David Rosenthal Now, I'm sure this is Rolex's version of history, but supposedly NASA reached out to Rolex first because they knew that test pilots preferred GMT Masters, but there was a mix-up in Rolex's New York purchasing office that led to this mishap…
• ▶ 2:22:16 David Rosenthal Now, I'm sure this is Rolex's version of history, but supposedly NASA reached out to Rolex first because they knew that test pilots preferred GMT Masters, but there was a mix-up in Rolex's New York purchasing office that led to this mishap…
• ▶ 2:22:42 Ben Gilbert If you work at Omega, please contact us and tell us what is the real version of this story, because we know no one at Rolex is going to call, so let's hear at least Omega's side of this.
• ▶ 2:23:33 David Rosenthal It was so ironic that the first president to wear a Rolex wore a date just, not a day date.
• ▶ 2:23:58 David Rosenthal He works with Rolex, and they sign the big three, quote unquote, in the golf world.
• ▶ 2:24:09 David Rosenthal And for their whole careers, I believe probably their whole lives, they are Rolex men.
• ▶ 2:24:31 David Rosenthal You know, not everybody, but at least a large share of the best players are Rolex players.
• ▶ 2:25:07 David Rosenthal So yeah, arguably tennis, especially post-Fedderer, is even more iconic Rolex than golf is.
• ▶ 2:25:20 David Rosenthal I mean, I don't think the Federer Rolex relationship is quite like a Michael Jordan Nike relationship, but it's in that next tier of great athlete partnerships, and there's a couple really interesting things about golf and tennis…
• ▶ 2:25:37 David Rosenthal One, just the overall brands of the sport, you know, mesh very well with Swiss luxury watch companies, but also even going all the way back to the thirties and the Wilsdorf days, the Hans days of Rolex,
• ▶ 2:26:34 David Rosenthal So, that wraps up the iconic tool sport professional watches at Rolex.
• ▶ 2:27:26 David Rosenthal At least from the Rolex side of things.
• ▶ 2:29:59 Ben Gilbert Okay, so David, the Rolex Daytona.
• ▶ 2:30:11 David Rosenthal So, the Daytona, unlike all of Rolex's other watches, is a chronograph, or as they call it, a cosmograph.
• ▶ 2:30:11 David Rosenthal So, the Daytona, unlike all of Rolex's other watches, is a chronograph, or as they call it, a cosmograph.
• ▶ 2:30:22 Ben Gilbert Yes, because again, this is Rolex.
• ▶ 2:30:33 Ben Gilbert However complicated you thought a regular mechanical watch was, now add in something like the Daytona, where you also have a full seconds hand on the main dial that counts seconds, and then another dial to count minutes, and then another…
• ▶ 2:30:54 David Rosenthal Yes, there are four dials on the watch face of the Daytona.
• ▶ 2:31:00 David Rosenthal Now, it turns out Rolex has actually made a chronograph for a very long time.
• ▶ 2:31:05 David Rosenthal This was the first tool watch that they introduced way back before World War II, before Andre Heidinger, before anybody was thinking about this stuff.
• ▶ 2:31:19 David Rosenthal So in 1962, Rolex becomes the official timekeeper of the then relatively new Daytona International Speedway.
• ▶ 2:31:31 David Rosenthal And to commemorate this great moment, the next year in 1963, Rolex officially starts calling their chronographs, which again, they've been making for like three decades at this point, Daytonas.
• ▶ 2:31:31 David Rosenthal And to commemorate this great moment, the next year in 1963, Rolex officially starts calling their chronographs, which again, they've been making for like three decades at this point, Daytonas.
• ▶ 2:31:44 Ben Gilbert They thought about Le Mans because they were also very closely involved with Le Mans, the race in France, but to the name Rolex, this has to have international appeal and can't have silent letters that Americans can't pronounce.
• ▶ 2:31:58 Ben Gilbert What's better than Daytona?
• ▶ 2:32:45 David Rosenthal And his equally famous wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, gifts him with a Rolex Daytona of his very own for his racing activities with the immortal inscription on the back, drive carefully dash me.
• ▶ 2:33:24 David Rosenthal There's so many of these moments in Rolex history, really in all the stories we tell, where the company does everything in their power to align the stars perfectly.
• ▶ 2:34:38 David Rosenthal The Paul Newman Daytona.
• ▶ 2:34:51 David Rosenthal And at the time, the market such as it existed for Daytona's, the secondary market for Daytona's, it was like a 200 dollar watch.
• ▶ 2:36:33 David Rosenthal So, the dealers start buying up the quote-unquote Paul Newman style Daytonas, which is a specific style, was made for a couple years by Rolex in the late sixties, early seventies, and it had like an art deco style face to it.
• ▶ 2:39:06 Ben Gilbert So I went and bought a Rolex.
• ▶ 2:40:13 Ben Gilbert Trickled out into the rest of the Daytonas.
• ▶ 2:40:15 Ben Gilbert It made any Daytona extremely desirable.
• ▶ 2:40:56 Ben Gilbert There's a whole world of seventies and eighties that's this almost like parallel universe to Rolex that we're gonna go into here in a minute.
• ▶ 2:41:04 Ben Gilbert Before we do that, it's worth resuming our history of Rolex advertising.
• ▶ 2:41:10 Ben Gilbert Because concurrent with releasing all of the professional watches, Rolex expanded their aperture in their marketing.
• ▶ 2:41:22 Ben Gilbert Men who guide the destinies of the world wear Rolex, to suddenly you've got these scuba divers, and these pilots, and these race car drivers now at the Daytona, and they're wearing the professional watches for their craft.
• ▶ 2:42:05 Ben Gilbert If you were flying the Concorde tomorrow, you'd wear a Rolex.
• ▶ 2:42:09 Ben Gilbert Picture of the Concorde, going supersonic, picture of the GMT Master.
• ▶ 2:42:35 Ben Gilbert You'd wear a Rolex.
• ▶ 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.
• ▶ 2:43:12 Ben Gilbert Rolex was really the one to bring lifestyle advertising to bear.
• ▶ 2:43:31 David Rosenthal Those incredible ads, that was really peak Rolex lifestyle era.
• ▶ 2:43:38 David Rosenthal This kind of second era of Rolex, of moving beyond the product to selling the lifestyle.
• ▶ 2:43:44 David Rosenthal And the Daytona was part of that.
• ▶ 2:43:53 David Rosenthal It's actually, I think, the first real big move that Rolex makes into the luxury world.
• ▶ 2:44:11 Ben Gilbert I mean, even in, I don't know, twenty-ten or something, you could walk into a jeweler who's an authorized Rolex dealer, and you could just buy something out of the case, which you cannot do today.
• ▶ 2:44:21 David Rosenthal Goodbye a Submariner, you could buy an Explorer, you could buy a GMT Master, you could buy a Datejust.
• ▶ 2:44:21 David Rosenthal Goodbye a Submariner, you could buy an Explorer, you could buy a GMT Master, you could buy a Datejust.
• ▶ 2:44:25 Ben Gilbert But you couldn't buy a Daytona.
• ▶ 2:44:35 David Rosenthal Today, if you want to buy a Rolex of any model, you go in and you put your name on the waitlist.
• ▶ 2:44:48 David Rosenthal The Daytona is, I think, the only model where there is no waitlist.
• ▶ 2:45:00 Ben Gilbert Hmm.
• ▶ 2:45:06 Ben Gilbert I think they're actually called Rolex retailers now.
• ▶ 2:45:17 David Rosenthal You know, if you go browse the forums, the lingo that I read is the Daytona is not a waitlist.
• ▶ 2:45:36 David Rosenthal Whereas with a Daytona, it's like, yeah, you can express desire.
• ▶ 2:46:21 Ben Gilbert We interpreted the assignment differently of do an episode on Rolex.
• ▶ 2:46:33 Ben Gilbert And I heard it as go fully understand the entire watch industry and contextualize Rolex's role within it.
• ▶ 2:47:22 Ben Gilbert He's one of the only people ever to get an interview with a sitting Rolex CEO.
• ▶ 2:55:55 David Rosenthal And in the early days, the Swiss industry and a lot of makers, including Rolex, released their own quartz models, too.
• ▶ 3:01:01 Ben Gilbert But interestingly, Rolex was independent.
• ▶ 3:01:04 Ben Gilbert They were owned by a foundation.
• ▶ 3:01:06 Ben Gilbert They sort of had no shareholders.
• ▶ 3:01:09 Ben Gilbert They also managed to resist joining the sort of Swiss cartel that was
• ▶ 3:01:20 Ben Gilbert I mean, they watched this certainly happen, and they had a lot of fear around it, but they weren't as caught up as the rest of the Switzerland companies that were all super, super dependent on each other.
• ▶ 3:01:52 Ben Gilbert And Rolex figured out how to build this enormous, bigger-than-ever-before business in this completely new market, A, of enthusiasts who sort of drive the excitement, that's sort of the auction house world, but then B, in this lifestyle…
• ▶ 3:02:12 David Rosenthal The Italian affair, the Paul Newman affair, is the luckiest thing that ever happened to Rolex, because this gave them the golden opportunity to do that.
• ▶ 3:02:38 David Rosenthal Rolex was better positioned than most of the other Swiss companies because they had already transitioned to lifestyle.
• ▶ 3:07:21 Ben Gilbert Okay, so a thing that I had a hard time figuring out until really the end of our research process, how did Rolex respond to the quartz crisis?
• ▶ 3:07:50 Ben Gilbert And then separately, they talk about Rolex through the years.
• ▶ 3:07:58 Ben Gilbert But Rolex was in Switzerland during the quartz crisis.
• ▶ 3:08:05 David Rosenthal And the end of the story, you know, spoiler alert, is Rolex is doing probably 10 plus billion dollars in annual revenue.
• ▶ 3:08:15 Ben Gilbert Dude, Rolex is 30% of the revenue in the entire Swiss watch industry.
• ▶ 3:09:02 David Rosenthal Rolex sits back, they see what not to do, they see what to do, and then they do it.