David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There are 30 Swiss companies doing this, especially because of the établissage, all of the component manufacturers are outside the brand. You just go around all the component manufacturers. Rolex is a little different because they have Aegler. But in general, you can go around to find all the different tiny little shops that are making each of these components, buy it, and make a watch. Totally. All the stuff that Hans was a genius at isn’t going to cut it in terms of differentiation for this new era. What Rolex now needs to do is move beyond what the actual product is on your wrist to more what does it say about you? That you’re wearing it to the brand of the company itself. What a signaling is, what it means about you. This is the first step towards becoming a luxury brand. I don’t know that André and they were thinking about it necessarily as luxury yet—and it’s not really luxury yet, it’s much more lifestyle at this point in time; it would later become luxury—but this is his real, real genius. From 1953 to 1955, Rolex—and again, Hans is still running the company; he dies in 1960—Hans, André launch a whole suite of wild new models, very different from the Datejust and the Oyster Perpetuals that we were talking about before. This is the Explorer, the Turn-O-Graph, the Submariner, the Milgauss, and the GMT-Master. These are what are then initially called the tool watches, but quickly morph into becoming known as the sport watches. The industry refers to them as sport watches or tool watches. Rolex calls them professional watches, which is funny because it’s the opposite of what you oh, a professional watch you would think is the Datejust, but they’re thinking about it as more of like a professional race car driver. That’s their—…

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