A simple wristwatch?

One of the professions I thought of having a long long time ago was Marketing. Why? Well, I really enjoy good advertisements. I remember I was a teenager and every year I watched the winners of the Golden Lion prize in the Festival de Cannes. In Brazil we have very good publicists like Washington Olivetto who already received this prize, worked in the DPZ and then co-founded the W/Brasil and many others W/ all through the world.

Even in times of crisis, this year's Baselworld, the world's biggest jewel and watch fair, was successful. Participants like the well known brands Pattek Philipe, Chanel, Chopard, Dior, Maurice Lacroix, Swatch and many others were there to impress the visitors with their style, luxe, design and a lot of technology. Some even look like pieces of art with a "don't touch" me face.

These are products that don't ever need advertisement. One example? Rolex. I have seen them many times around here, I mean the product, but not its propaganda.

Founded in 1905 by Wilsdorf and his brother-in-law in London, the trademark Rolex was just registered in 1908, when it also had its first office opened in Switzerland, and in 1919 they moved the company to Geneva. Why the name Rolex? No one knows for sure, maybe it came from the fact that they wanted the brand to be easily pronounceable in any language, maybe because in French the phrase "horlogerie exquise" (?), or maybe because Wilsdorf was a Rolls Royce driver and just loved the car quality, so he put Rol and TIMEX together to make Rolex (????). The Rolex Oyster

Up to today, they were responsible for a series of innovations in this field: the first official chronometer certification for a wristwatch (1910), most watches by that time were pocket watches; from 1914, when Rolex was awarded by the Kew Observatory in Great Britain with a CLASS A precision certificate, it became well known by people and from that year on it became even more famous. In 1926, they developed the first waterproof model of watch, the Oyster, which one year later was used by the English woman Mercedes Gleitze to swim the Channel. Following the launch of the Prince model, with the Rolex Oyster Perpetual they invented and patented the first rotor-wound water-resistant wristwatch, precursor of today’s self-winding wristwatches. And many other innovations like the first water-resistant wrist-chronometer to show the date, the first water-resistance to 100 metres, the first self-winding, water-resistant wristwatch to display time simultaneously in any two time zones, they also participated in the development of the original quartz watch movements. In 2005, happened the launch of the Prince model, inspired by the 1929 original.

The Rolex Oyster Perpetual

Like many high-priced, brand-name accessories, Rolex watches are frequently counterfeited. Often illegally sold on the street and on the internet, these fakes are mainly produced in China due to the ease in copying the general design and can be bought on retail anywhere from $5 to $1000—for high end replicas fabricated in solid gold. By some accounts, over 75% of all replica watches produced annually are copies of Rolex Oyster Perpetual designs.

Nowadays there are Rolexes to fit anybody's needs. You can even ask yourself which Rolex watch would Batman or Wolverine choose? Batman has some for the everyday life as the magnate Bruce Wayne, probably when he is Batman he probably uses a Batwatch together with his utility belt. If you remember well, Wolverine often fights Magnet, one of the many X-Men enemies and who is a mutant master of magnetism. So he would prefer to wear a Rolex Milgauss, designed in 1954 as an antimagnetic watch specifically for those who work in areas where electromagnetic fields can damage the perfect timing of a watch, like power plants.

The Rolex Milgaus

Source: wikipedia, rolex.com.