He had my immediate attention and I had a ton of questions of model, age and cost. The next day he brought in a slip of paper with some details scribbled down and I was straight onto the Rolex website searching for details.
I had his DateJust all speced up and printed off a picture when I showed him and he confirmed to me that this was indeed the watch he owned. I asked him if he wanted to know the cost of a new DateJust and let him know that the going rate was $10,800 for a brand new purchase.
He then informed me he purchased his in 1991 when he was working in Karachi for $2000 off a dealer secondhand but in new condition. Apparently, back then locals were having difficulty getting their hands on hard currency so they would purchase precious commodities such as Rolex watches only to sell them to dealers for US dollars.
I share a desk with a guy and he was exasperated on how anyone would pay $10,800 for a watch, it was just a watch he said, he could buy two mountain bikes for that type of money. My first thought was who would pay $5000 for a mountain bike?
I believe a mechanical watch is a work of art in both aesthetics and engineering. As we are both engineering tradesmen, I thought he would appreciate the level of engineering precision required to ensure this series of springs, sprockets, drive mechanisms and balance wheels work in unison to accurately measure time.
As a business student, I loved researching the business of the Swiss watchmaking industry. Watchmaking companies such as Rolex, IWC, Breitling, Heuer and Omega produced timepieces for occupations, these roots in occupational timekeeping developed a heritage of utility.
The Rolex Submariner and Sea Dweller were standard issue for commercial divers, Breitling produced timepieces for aviators, IWC supplied the Luftwaffe during the second world war, Omega supplied NASA timepieces and Heuer produced timepieces for motorists and racers.
During the 1970s, the quartz crisis nearly derailed the Swiss watchmaking industry with cheap products forcing the industry to reorganise. The Swiss watchmaking industry reinvented itself seeking the upmarket luxury goods sector.
Heuer was purchased by TAG Industries in 1985 to form TAG Heuer before being sold to luxury goods manufacturer Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 1999, Omega is now owned by the Swatch Group and Rolex remains an independent company.
The art of watchmaking is not limited to solely the mechanical specifications, the beauty of the art of the watch cannot be underestimated. How do you value art?
There is a market for fine art from Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso that could be described as simply as just oil on canvas or watercolour and paper. Likewise, Tchaikovsky created the masterpiece of the 1812 Overture, Vivaldi created the four seasons and then there was Beethoven and Mozart.
Can the sum of the parts be simply calculated in terms of value; Van Gogh, a man who couldn't sell a painting within his own lifetime is now strongly represented on the list of highest prices paid for art. Artists like Willem de Kooning, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Rembrandt or Jackson Pollock fetch outstanding prices.
The brilliance of Rolex is their marketing; their relative rarity creates a market as people are willing to place an order and wait two years for timepiece - that's pretty special.
This also supplements their design that doesn't change much, the Rolex Explorer I is pretty similar to the 1953 design. The Cosmograph Daytona only just upgraded from a manually wound movement to an automatic movement.
The 1957 design Speedmaster Professional still utilises the 1861 manually wound movement and is pretty much identical to the watch worn on the moon by NASA astronauts.
For a reasonable price, the average citizen is able to purchase identical hardware that not only traveled to the moon, NASA still issues the Speedmaster Professional to the current crop of astronauts.
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