Rolex

“If you think about a luxury brand, that's more consensual. I'm not wearing a Rolex because it tells time better. It's because I want people to know I have money. I'm signaling something, but that signal value is only useful if everybody else agrees that a Role…”

“They want you to buy so many of the precious metals and the stones, the ones that are 10, 20, 50, 60,000 dollars. If you buy enough of them, they'll let you buy a lower price Submariner, which is a wild thing. The margins are in the more expensive watches, and…”

“Back on our Rolex episode, we threw out the idea of a functional alibi, a reason you could claim that you need such a watch. For Ferrari, they have lots of incredible alibis. Most people do not experience the thing that you just described, feeling maximally al…”

“Like, you shouldn't have a Rolex, right? It's like very classless, if that makes sense, to like show up as a startup founder with a Rolex, right?”

“And so the fake Rolex for me was I was trying to find a way to enter rooms, not as a broke kid and enter rooms as the person I wanted to become. So it wasn't fake it till you make it. It was how do I give myself the confidence when I'm 24 to be future me?”

“Patek tends to not miss, like they kind of bat a thousand when they do things. And I think everyone wants these big brands to catch an L so they can talk shit about it and feel like, you know, they're able to say that.”

“And they just announced Leonardo DiCaprio as an ambassador and they dropped the whole like Rolex family page where it talks about like all aspects and touch points of creative entertainment, sports, whatever.”

“Like, there's that story where the in Wolf of Wall Street, he's wearing what looks like a, like, I believe it's like a vintage GMT Rolex, but it's actually a tag horror that they had, like, intentionally made to look like it was like an old eighties, not like,…”

“I think there's undeniably a set of collectors that That don't want to be ambassadors because they want to wear a diverse collection, right? Like I, you saw the same thing I remember sitting down with some early investors in GOAT and they capitalized that in t…”

“Over a million people a year actually do buy one, and for an average price of 13,000 dollars each.”

“The founders of arguably maybe the three biggest and most significant luxury brands in the world today were all orphans from the 1800.”

“When you buy a Submariner or a Daytona or even a Datejust, you are not buying Swiss history here. You are buying 20th century modernity, as we will get into.”

“This carries through this relationship for the next 99 years until Rolex finally buys Egler in 2004, where Egler is making the movements for Rolex watches, and I don't think there's ever any real formal arrangement here. It's basically a handshake deal.”

“He places the largest order in Egler's company history, several 100,000 Swiss francs, for a bunch of these tiny movements.”

“In 1910, he sends the first Wristwatch movement to the School of Horology in Switzerland to be awarded the world's first wristwatch chronometer rating.”

“World War I is truly the first crucible moment for... Rolex, because it's the best thing that ever happened to the company and the industry. It made the whole world care about wristwatches.”

“I think if that were the only factor, Rolex probably would have stayed in England.”

“In the hype of 20 20 to 20 22, the precious metals were actually easier to come by as a customer because there was so much less demand to go buy a 30, 5000 thousand dollar watch that those would kind of be lying around while the steel ones were flying off the …”

“And even to this day, this is crazy. Design, sales, marketing, and I think final assembly all happened in Geneva while production of the movement still happens up in the mountains in Vienna.”

“Rolex did not focus on the American market until after World War II.”

“They had at least three failed attempts to create a waterproof seal in-house.”

“What Rolex doesn't talk about to these days is a footnote to history of, it wasn't actually on her wrist.”

“One of his maniacal control things was, I believe up until he died or pretty close to it, he did all the creative for all the advertising.”

“But if you look at their product catalogs, really up until World War II, ladies models outnumbered men's models two to one.”

“And even to this day, I believe the market of buyers for Rolex watches is basically fifty-fifty, men and women.”

“There was an article published at this time that said you could get a Rolex for as little as 25 dollars. Even if you inflation adjust that, it's like 450 bucks today. Or for as high as a thousand dollars, which is 18,000.”

“Rolex finally cracks it and patents their own Rotor, quote unquote, self-winding system, which still to this day is the primary method of self-winding across the entire industry.”

“In 1932, Omega released a waterproof watch, which is, I don't know, half a decade after Rolex. This is considered to be the world's first dive watch. No one talks about this today. You hear dive watch, you think Rolex, but Omega had the first dive watch.”

“In 1936, I feel like this is a big moment, and kind of exactly what you were saying. As your competitors fall off a cliff due to economic hardship, there's an opportunity, if you have the right product that's working well in the market, to kind of consolidate …”

“This is Panerai. This is the Panerai watch. Rolex makes the Panerai watch. So, you know, anybody who knows Panerai, famous, you know, very Art Deco style dive watch. They have two main models now, the Luminor and the Radiomir. Yeah, Panerai was a retailer befo…”

“Well, less than a year later, Rolex makes their 150,000 officially certified chronometer once again in the now, you know, new top of the line Datejust model. And who does Hans go to for this one? Through, not directly, but with some influence of the fact that …”

“So, at this time, Rolex finally brings on a third-party advertising agency, the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency in New York. Rolex and J. Walter Thompson, in collaboration after Eisenhower becomes president wearing his Datejust, launched a campaign in th…”

“His first wife, Anna, died tragically in 1944, right before the end of World War II. And that is actually when Hans sets up the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation and puts all of his ownership of the company into it.”

“Still to this day, the Lady Datejust, I believe, is the single best-selling model in the Rolex catalog.”

“From 1953 to 19 55, Rolex, and again, Hans is still running the company, he dies in 1960, but Rolex, Hans, Andre, launch a whole suite of wild new models, very different than the Datejust and the Oyster Perpetuals that we were talking about before. This is the…”

“You'll continue to see this in everything that is in the Rolex universe, is we don't want to be lumped into any sort of a category, so we have to refer to something entirely different, such that we can't be put into a box. Like, they don't make spore watches. …”

“It was designed in association with the engineers at CERN in Switzerland, the particle accelerator, for scientists who are working While exposed to strong magnetic fields.”

“However, Sir Edmund Hillary did not prefer his Rolex. He had a Smith's watch that he preferred to wear.”

“If you separated Submariner from Rolex, Submariner may actually be a bigger deal. Submariner is its own whole franchise.”

“Because Rolex does not engage in, ugh, paid product placement.”

“James Cameron On a manned submersible takes the Sea-Dweller Deep Sea Challenge, and it actually is, I think, all of those brands. They, like, include the sub-brand with the parent brand in this thing, down to the Marianas Trench, to the deepest part of the oce…”

“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.”

“In this forties, fifties, sixties, Omega was the big brand. Like Rolex had a target in mind to beat, and that target was Omega, who was bigger.”

“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 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. Rolex was really the one to bring lifestyle advertising to bear.”

“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.”

“And in the early days, the Swiss industry and a lot of makers, including Rolex, released their own quartz models, too.”

“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.”

“And incredibly, Joe Thompson tipped me off to this, in a study conducted by Gallup in 1978, they asked the question, have you heard of Rolex? Eight out of 10 Americans in 1978 answered no.”

“Once you create the Porsche nine 11, you should just tweak the Porsche nine 11 once every seven, eight years, and that way you can buy a nine 11 just like your grandfather bought a nine 11.”

“They poured a huge amount of R&D into quartz watches, but they didn't productize most of it. They did these small runs of this oyster quartz”

“Rolex had a built-in hedge because of their independence and because of their cash position. Everybody else is just gonna do all the scrambly stuff fast. They're all super reliant on each other, and they're all overextended. And Rolex is this incredibly conser…”

“Much like the IKEA foundations that we talked about on that episode, the primary purpose of the Wilsdorf Foundation is to ensure the continued operations of Rolex.”

“And so I think if they had gone quartz, Rolex would be fine today. That would be a way to build a good business. But the way to potentially build a great business was to try this crazy Blancpain-esque strategy, but at scale with one of the biggest and most suc…”

“They could sell their products for much, much more than they do, and they do not, because it is the right long-term decision to do so.”

“He presided over, most importantly, the Agler acquisition in 2004. For rumored roughly a billion Swiss francs, Rolex buys Agler and makes it officially in-house.”

“That is the absolute opposite of what you need to do as a luxury company. It can't be like, this one's better than that one, or different levels of quality, or these imperfections here, and it's cute. It's like, absolutely not. That is critically important bec…”

“They're going to absurd lengths to make these things the highest quality engineered and produced products in the entire industry or in any other industry too.”

“Rolex didn't cut prices, didn't stop sponsoring the U.S. Open.”

“So interestingly, Rolex actually massively doubled down on their marketing spend in the US during the 2008 financial crisis”