|
In 1908, Rolex was founded by Mr. Hans
Wilsdorf, a German National Citizen. Initially the company was named Wilsdorf
& Davis as Wilsdorf founded company together with his brother in law. At the
time, mostly pocket watches were produced by Swiss watch manufacturers as
manufactures still had difficulty to produce accurate and reliable movements in
such small size that they would fit in a wrist watch. Wilsdorf was a
perfectionist who improved the standards for watch making as he did strive for
smaller and more accurate movements that transformed style and fashion from
larger pocket watches to smaller more practical wristwatches. Aegler, a small
Swiss company agreed to supply Wilsdorf with movements small enough to be worn
on the wrist. Wilsdorf's production included a variety of case designs: casual,
formal and sporty.
In 1910, Rolex sent their first movement to the School of
Horology in Switzerland. It was awarded the world's first wrist watch
chronometer rating. Wilsdorf recognized two major requirements for watches: 1)
To keep accurate time, and 2) To be reliable. With the Chronometer Award,
'accuracy' of timekeeping was considered to be under control and Wilsdorf
started to work on improving the reliability of his watches. One of the main
problems at the time was, that dust and moisture would enter in the watch case
and progressively damage in movement. To solve, one would need to develop a
completely dust and waterproof watch case. Dust and water would enter watch
cases via the casebook and via the crown. Wilsdorf developed a screw crown and
casebook mechanism that revolutionized the watch industry.
The first waterproof watch was cleverly advertised around
the world. At the time, the public was rather skeptical if the watch would be
really waterproof. However, after seeing a watch in an aquarium in the shop
window, many people were convinced. Around the world one could see windows of
watch shops with an aquarium and submerged Rolex watches. This campaign created
an enormous brand awareness for Rolex. Since then, Rolex has continued to be at
the forefront of the watch making industry. Today, almost every watch
manufacturer followed Rolex and offers waterproof watches.
The Rolex Prince, developed in 1928 became a best seller
with its dual dial and rectangular case. In 1931 Rolex invented the "Rotor" - a
semicircular plate of metal that with gravity, would move freely to wind the
watch. Thus, the Rolex "Perpetual" (automatic) movement was born.
Rolex's star has risen much higher since those days of the
First World War. "People want to own a Rolex because it shows that they made
it.". It is something to which you aspire and then treat yourself after a
successful venture or a windfall.
Industry watchers say that what distinguishes Rolex from
other premium timepieces is its signature look--a big, round face paired with a
wide metal band--that's become as familiar on a basketball court as at a
black-tie reception. Identifiable from across a room, the Rolex look has an
unrivaled, near-universal appeal. Sportsmen value its ruggedness, adventurers
its reliability and royalty its elegance. The design's evolution could be best
described as glacial. There have been changes over the years, but it's all in
the details. Take Rolex's first calendar watch, the Datejust. If you put a
Datejust from 1945 beside a Datejust from 1998, you'll see the resemblance.
There probably won't be a single part inside that's interchangeable, but the
outward design has evolved ever so marginally."
This timeless appeal often translates into an excellent
investment. At Christie's auction house in London last September, the excitement
created by the sale of a private collection of 360 Rolex watches dating from the
1910s to the 1990s surprised even the most nonchalant pundits. The highlight of
the auction was the sale of a cult icon--a late-1960s stainless-steel
manual-wound Paul Newman Cosmograph Daytona (so named because the actor wore one
in the 1969 racing flick Winning) that took the hammer for a cool $21,212, twice
its estimated value. The Paul Newman, with its flashy dial and oversized
indexes, wasn't an immediate success and was produced for a very limited time.
Its meteoric ascent in popularity didn't begin until the mid-1980s. The Italians
were the first to go for it. It was perfectly possible 16, 17 years ago to buy a
Daytona at 20 to 25 percent under list price in England or America at the same
time Italians would pay you 30 to 40 percent over list. Let's just say it was a
nice little earner for quite a number of enterprising people.
By the time Daytona fever swept across Europe and the United
States in the late 1980s, a relaunch was already in the works. Introduced in
1991, the updated Daytona replicated the original's racy chronograph--a built-in
stopwatch that's perfect for timing the morning sprints of Kentucky Derby
contenders or your nine-year-old's dash for first base--but added an automatic
winder. Today, the $5,150 stainless-steel Cosmograph with a white face--the
rarest combination and the one that Paul Newman reportedly wears off screen--is
one of the country's most-coveted timepieces. The Daytona is actually worth
more on the secondary market than its retail price. I mean, here's a watch
that--assuming you could find one, that is--you could pick up new and turn
around and resell for a $2,000 profit. And in steel.
But the best-known Swiss watchmaker has always been
something of an outsider in Geneva. Perhaps it's because the company didn't
start out Swiss. As mentioned, Rolex was founded in London, in 1905, by the
24-year-old Wilsdorf, a German who became a British citizen after taking an
English bride. It was an era when national borders tended to define men's
ambitions, but Wilsdorf thought big from the beginning. In 1908, before anyone
had uttered the term multinational, Wilsdorf trademarked the word Rolex, a name
that's easily pronounced in different languages and short enough to fit on a
watch dial. It's said that Wilsdorf dreamed up the word while riding a London
bus, having been inspired by the sound a watch makes as it is wound. Rolex
didn't leave England until after the First World War, when an import tax hike of
33 percent made receiving its Swiss-made movements prohibitively expensive.
The company's first decade was driven by its founder's
relentless obsession with precision. "Wilsdorf wasn't content merely to invent
the first wristwatch. He wanted to invent the first truly accurate wristwatch,
one that you could actually run your life by." Validation came in 1914, when
London's Kew Observatory certified a Rolex wristwatch to be as precise as a
marine chronometer. It was the first time that a watch had received
"chronometer" status--a classification that, even today, is held by a relative
few timepieces.
Still, improved accuracy didn't immediately transform the
wristwatch into an essential item in the common man's wardrobe. Dust, heat and
moisture had a way of wreaking havoc with a wristwatch's intricate mechanical
movements, and the earliest models required too much maintenance to be
practical. Rolex's big breakthrough came in 1926, when Wilsdorf developed a case
that was impervious and waterproof. The secret was a revolutionary
double-locking crown that screwed down on the case like a submarine hatch to
create an airtight seal. Recalling his difficulty in prying open an oyster at a
dinner party, Wilsdorf christened his creation the Rolex Oyster.
To launch his company's new timepiece into the popular
consciousness, Wilsdorf came up with an ingenious publicity stunt. After
learning that a young British woman named Mercedes Gleitze was planning to swim
across the English Channel, he presented her with a Rolex Oyster and dispatched
a photographer to chronicle her endeavor. When Gleitze emerged triumphantly from
the sea, her Oyster was keeping perfect time and, true to its name, had remained
waterproof. Wilsdorf capitalized with a splashy front-page ad in London's Daily
Mail newspaper, touting "The Wonder Watch that Defies the Elements: Moisture
Proof. Waterproof. Heat Proof. Vibration Proof. Cold Proof. Dust Proof." It was
the genesis of the famous Rolex testimonial ad campaign that continues to this
day.
If the first Oyster had an Achilles' heel, it was its winder
button. The watch was hermetic only when the button was screwed down. To
discourage people from toying with the winder, Wilsdorf came up with another
innovation that propelled the industry forward even further. In 1931, Rolex
introduced a "perpetual" rotor that literally rewound a watch with every flick
of the wearer's wrist. The world's first successful automatic watch became the
bedrock of the Rolex empire. "The Oyster Perpetual is really what makes a Rolex
a Rolex--it's waterproof, with a tiny engine that you power every single time
you move your arm."
Nearly 70 years later, the Oyster Perpetual has proved
undaunted by the worst possible conditions. It has survived the depths of the
sea with Jacques Piccard and the summit of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary's
Sherpa. It has retained its accuracy in subzero arctic temperatures, the
scorching Sahara and the weightlessness of outer space. It has shrugged off
plane crashes, shipwrecks, and speedboat accidents, broken the sound barrier,
and been ejected from a fighter jet at 22,000 feet. Some of the most colorful
recommendations are the cautionary tales: the Englishman who inadvertently
laundered his Oyster in a scalding cycle, then rinsed, spun and tumble-dried it;
the Australian skydiver who dropped his from 800 feet above the outback; or the
Californian whose wife accidentally baked his in a 500-degree oven. In each
case, the recovered Rolex was running perfectly.
By the advent of the Second World War, the Rolex name had
become so prestigious in Britain that pilots in the Royal Air Force rejected
inferior government-issued watches and used their paychecks to nearly deplete
England's supply of Oyster Perpetuals. The compliment was duly returned: any
British prisoner of war whose Rolex was confiscated had only to write to Geneva
to receive a replacement. Yankee GIs returned home with a new trinket on their
wrists. And so Rolex's romance with America began.
Though he lived in Geneva for 40 years, Wilsdorf never
became a Swiss citizen. He died a Briton in 1960 and was remembered by
colleagues as a good-humored, fatherly man who loved life as much as he loved a
fine watch. Two years after his death, the company's board of directors
appointed 41-year-old André Heiniger as Rolex's new managing director. While
working under Wilsdorf for 12 years, Heiniger had come to share his boss' vision
for the company, as well as his high energy level and sanguine outlook. All
three traits proved invaluable when the Swiss watch industry found itself
slipping into oblivion.
Just as video killed the radio star, the quartz boom of the
late 1960s and early 1970s nearly snuffed out the mechanical timepiece faster
than you can say "Seiko." By substituting low-cost, digital technology for
labor-intensive artisanship, the Japanese sent the Swiss horology industry into
crisis mode. Yet while most of Geneva's watch houses feverishly hitched their
star to the digital bandwagon, Rolex stuck resolutely to its mechanical guns. By
the time the dust had settled, more than half of Geneva's watch manufacturers
had gone under. Fully a third of the survivors, including such prestigious names
as Omega, Longines, Blancpain, Tissot, Rado, and Hamilton, were subsumed into a
publicly owned consortium to avoid bankruptcy. This fate won't befall Rolex.
Wilsdorf, an heirless widower at his death, created a private trust run by a
board of directors to insure the company would never be sold.
What made Rolex so resilient? "The single most important
thing that saved Rolex is that up until then the company had only been run by
two managing directors: Hans Wilsdorf and André Heiniger. They really never had
to worry about this quarter's results. They could think long-term appeal: 'Where
will we be in five or ten years' time?' That's a completely different philosophy
than at another watch house. Even in times of uncertainty, Rolex's greatest
policy was never to adopt change for change's sake." Revealingly, the single
quartz model developed by Rolex in the 1970s never exceeded 7 percent of the
company's total production. (Today, that figure is 2 percent).
"If Rolex had gone to quartz there's no way it would have
the image and prestige it has now." And being a private company without external
shareholders, Rolex can better afford to remain aloof to fads than many of its
counterparts. That means no chunky cases, no madcap numerals, no avant-garde
shapes--nothing that's going to look dated in a decade's time.
In 1992, Patrick Heiniger replaced his father as Rolex's
managing director. Both Heinigers share the twin virtues of undying optimism and
ironclad discretion, according to colleagues. It's a combination that generates
intrigue among rivals and industry observers. Montres Rolex S.A. is hugely secretive. Rolex always was an
outsider company in Switzerland. Their top executives almost never do
interviews. Essentially, their philosophy has always been to let the product
speak for itself. At Rolex, the product is an obsession."
Consider the care taken to decorate the inside of a
Rolex--the parts the wearer never even sees. At the company's Geneva
headquarters, Rolex's craftsmen, dressed in white laboratory smocks, pull up to
ergonomically designed workstations, then execute minute operations in near
silence. Each component of every tiny movement is sculpted with swirls, lines or
loops. Every angle is rounded and polished to a brilliant shine. This provides
absolutely no value to the consumer, except as a gesture of the brand's
refinement.
That Rolex has always produced its own movements separates
it from other well-known mechanical brands. More than 200 craftsmen and
technicians will work on a watch before it acquires Rolex certification.
"There's so much more to a Rolex than the average person will ever need. And in
that sense it's the Mercedes-Benz of wristwatches. It's over engineered. Not
because Rolex wants to squander money but because that's just the way they do
things."
Before leaving Geneva, every Rolex watch must travel through
a high-tech obstacle course of quality-control checks. Every dial, bezel and
winder will be checked and double-checked for scratches, dust and aesthetic
imperfection. The microscopic distance between its hour and minute hands will be
painstakingly calibrated to ascertain that they are lying perfectly parallel. An
ominous-looking air-pressure chamber will verify that each watch is waterproof
to a depth of 330 feet. (The Submariner and Sea-Dweller divers' models are
guaranteed to 1,000 and 4,000 feet, respectively.) And every watch will engage
in a precision face-off against an atomic-generated "überclock" that loses but
two seconds every 100 years. Only after successfully passing dozens of
checkpoints does a watch receive the Rolex seal.
Such attention to detail limits Rolex's production to about
650,000 watches a year, based on industry estimates. "That might sound like a
lot," insists Lister of Christie's, "but it's very far below market demand."
But, as André Heiniger once said, "We've never wanted to be the biggest, but
certainly one of the finest in the field." |
