@theventure: Tag @rolex to see it 👇 Men refused wristwatches because wearing one got you laughed at. That is a status problem, and no amount of engineering solves it. Advertising could not solve it either, because an advertisement is a seller talking about himself. What a man needed was a reason he could repeat to other men. So in 1914 Wilsdorf sent a wristwatch to Kew Observatory, which certified the navigation clocks the Royal Navy relied on at sea, and it came back with the highest grade. After that a man could say he was wearing a certified marine chronometer, and the verdict had come from somebody with nothing to sell. He did the same with water in 1926. He gave a waterproof Oyster to a woman swimming the English Channel and made sure the press was watching. The cold beat her after ten hours and she was pulled out, and the watch was still keeping perfect time. Wilsdorf bought the front page of Britain's biggest newspaper the next morning. Her failure is what made it convincing, because the watch had outlasted the person wearing it. Rolex now sells $13 billion a year. Wilsdorf had no children, and when he died in 1960 he left the whole company to a charity named for his wife. No person has owned Rolex since. Follow @theventure for the greatest founder stories ever told.

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Sunday 06 September 2026 15:56:05 GMT