Ben Clymer

But effectively, there was this woman named Mercedes Glitz, who was a typist of all things, basically a secretary in the UK.

And she had swum the English Channel successfully, the first woman to swim the English Channel successfully.

And Hans Wilsdorf, the founder, said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if this woman, A, she's a woman, B, she's doing this amazing feat that no one had ever done before.

Wouldn't it be cool if she wore the watch around her neck?

So she didn't wear it on her wrist, to be clear.

She put it around her neck.

And she attempted to swim the English Channel.

She actually didn't successfully do it.

She failed, but nobody really cared because she had already done it before.

And so he took out an ad celebrating the fact that this watch was around this woman's neck for 10 hours in the English Channel.

And the timekeeping was flawless.

And so that kind of solidified Rolex as a household name because the Oyster case had been validated in the English Channel with this early brand ambassador, I guess you would call her.

That was a huge deal.

And I think one of the earliest examples of real marketing by any luxury brand or any brand really at all.

And then the final tenant would be self-winding, which is, I would equate it to like the automatic transmission.

When the automatic transmission came around, all of a sudden driving a car became a hell of a lot easier.

You just became wider, accepted, et cetera.

So prior to, I guess it was around 19, I'm going to say 30 something that Rolex patented the first self-winding movement.

To be clear, there was somebody called John Harwood that actually had a different self-winding movement first.

I think that was in the 20s.