Issue 148: Thoughts on the Rolex Land-Dweller
Also: Trump's tariffs and the desperate search for mainstream value
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that’s back from Geneva! It certainly wasn’t a dull week: I am approximately 50 per cent strong opinions, 50 per cent chocolate right now. The major stories have risen to the top, but making good sense of the rest of Watches & Wonders can, in my experience, benefit from a few days’ perspective (at least). So I have decided to wait until next week to give you my thoughts on some of the more controversial and unexpected watches of the fair. There are some questions I want answering before I pass judgement, and ironically after seeing hundreds of exciting new watches (and some less so), the one thing I lack is time. I’m writing this in the airport on Friday as I head back to London, and there are only so many things I can cram in. In this issue, I give you my detailed thoughts on the Rolex Land-Dweller, a brief response to the Trump tariffs, and some thoughts on value for money.
Disclaimer: Watches & Wonders paid for my flights, hotel and meals within the fair. As ever, the quid pro quo is that you write about the event and its brands/launches, not that you shower it in gushing praise. You can expect it to get the usual TFW treatment.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Trump’s Tariffs
Wrecking-ball economic policies threaten the entire Swiss watch industry
By now you will probably have heard: Donald Trump announced worldwide import tariffs on Wednesday 2nd and Switzerland has been hit with a 31% duty on all products imported to the United States.
Everyone’s written about it so I’ll try to focus on the in-person reaction I heard at the fair.
It’s better news for anyone who isn’t bothered about the phrase ‘Swiss Made’. For the first time in decades this phrase risks being a handicap rather than a boon, as fairly obviously, the one option that’s not open to Swiss watch brands is to relocate their production to the USA. Apparently, H. Moser CEO Edouard Meylan, whose watches make a point of not carrying ‘Swiss Made’ labelling, said not entirely seriously that he could equip his US service centre to carry out final assembly. The kernel of reality in a comment like this is that everyone will be looking for ways to lower the value of whatever they have to ship into the USA.
Brands realise they can’t pass on a 31 per cent price hike to consumers. The pain is likely to be spread across the profit margins of every link in the chain, from brand to distributor (if applicable) to retailer, with perhaps a single-digit price rise to cap things off. Because brands also don’t enjoy it when their prices aren’t globally aligned, that would mean small rises for the rest of us too.
A couple of indie brands said that the news exposed weaknesses in the industry’s governance. The watch world - like Switzerland itself - is opposed to strong centralised leadership, preferring its institutions to be mild-mannered and subservient than strong advocates of top-down control. There is a relatively new head of the FH: it could be an opportunity for him to show that the organisation is good for more than issuing reports. Getting the big power players - Swatch, LVMH, Richemont, Rolex and Patek - at the same table and singing from the same hymnsheet has historically been far from simple. Will this bring them together? Who knows.
Most executives and brand founders - that I spoke to or that I’ve heard from other journalists - were hesitant to be drawn into taking a strong stance. “Wait and see” is the public message, while behind the scenes I’m sure it’s frantic. Some think Trump is going to negotiate the rate down - I’m not sure I’d bet on it - while others are probably just not sure what else to say at this stage.
Some people are shipping as many watches into the US as they can in the short term, before tariffs take effect, but that’s only a short-term measure.
Most expected there to be a counterbalance to the tariff announcement, either in terms of US customers travelling to buy watches or other markets rising in response, but there is no ignoring the fact that other markets have been underperforming recently. Let’s remember the USA imported CHF4.37bn of watches in 2024, more than double that of China, the second largest market.
British brands were marginally happier. “We might finally have a competitive advantage against the Swiss”, one CEO said wryly. The problem with this is that British brands are small and don’t all have a thriving operation on US soil already. It will be expensive to set up subsidiary companies in the US and establish distribution centres - and there are wider implications for small businesses suddenly making a good portion of their revenue overseas and having to bring those profits back home (or reallocate cash flow to their US wing). I wonder whether the Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers will be doing anything to help - if it were me, I’d get members to chip in to fund a US distribution company that could handle 20-30 brands’ American business.
Consumer sentiment was pretty gloomy. While there’s generally a view that anyone spending six figures on a watch will quickly resign themselves to paying more, even wealthy and experienced collectors are finding the timing abysmal: as I discuss below, prices at the fair could generally be characterised as steep already. Now they’re likely to get even higher, as their intended buyers see their stock portfolios take a hit and their business interests suffer. A tough market just got a lot tougher.
Thoughts On The Rolex Land-Dweller
Making sense of the first all-new Rolex in 13 years
Watch experts’ understanding of Rolex is built on a number of long-standing assumptions. The idea that there are certain things the brand doesn’t ever do helps to inform our understanding of everything from product development to retail strategy. But lately Rolex has done a few quite unexpected things. Some are huge, like buying Bucherer - a move whose impact is still filtering through - and some are pretty tiny, like allowing certain key media outlets to have an advance briefing on the Land-Dweller and hands-on time with the finished watch before Watches & Wonders began. (Other examples include producing a sustainability report and then actually commenting on it to the press, for example).
This kind of stuff might seem like real inside baseball if you’re not a watch journalist but actually, I think understanding Rolex’s secretive approach to launches goes further than professional jealousy over who was invited to the inner circle. Although it is indicative of the power of YouTube that Rolex chose Teddy Baldasarre and didn’t give the story to any newspaper titles. That’s pretty modern thinking for a Swiss watch brand.
For as long as I can remember, the big Rolex launch of Baselworld or Watches & Wonders would be a total secret to the outside world until the doors opened on day one. Staff at the regional PR and marketing level would only find out a day or two ahead of time what products they were going to have to become experts in, and what questions journalists might be likely to throw at them. This sense of highly guarded secrecy was part of what made Rolex special. I’m not suggesting it’s no longer special as a brand, but behaving like other companies is telling.
It tells me that Rolex knew the Land-Dweller might need a bit more work to be guaranteed of a good landing. Not that it’s worried about negative comments per se; new Rolex watches always come in for knee-jerk criticism online and it’s usually water off a duck’s back. But there is a lot to explain with the Land-Dweller and I think getting the story out ahead of time is a tacit acknowledgement that it wasn’t going to be as easily understood and readily appreciated as new flagship Rolexes usually are.
So what were people saying, and what do I think?
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