Ben Clymer

And Rolex, they struggled as well.

Never to the degree that the others did, but it was not great for them.

And then the 90s started to come around, and Rolex had a CEO by the name of Patrick Heinegger.

His father was actually also CEO, to give you an idea of how things worked at Rolex.

And he said, I want to take Rolex in-house.

And he was really the first to do it, frankly, well before Patek or well before anybody else.

And so Rolex was using 27 different suppliers to make, say, a Submariner.

And after he was done with it, they're using four.

And now those four are completely owned by Rolex.

There are four different production facilities, two in Geneva, one in what I would call proper Geneva, one in Plon-le-Watt, which is a little bit outside.

And then there's one in Schienenburg, which does dials, and there's one in BL, which makes the movements.

But what's so amazing is Rolex, to me, the kind of secret sauce is equal parts case, equal parts movement.

The cases, you can kind of reverse engineer if you're a competitor and say, okay, what's an Oyster case?

It's got this, it's got that, it's polished there.

Seals are done by X, Y, and Z. Movements are a different thing entirely.

And what's amazing is Rolex Geneva, which is basically dials, cases, bracelets, all that stuff.

And Rolex Bienne, which is up in the mountains, the Valet de Joux, had a handshake deal for 70 years.

And I mean an actual handshake deal that the calibers made by what was then called Eagler, who made the first movement for Hans Wollstorff.

That company was making movements solely for Rolex Geneva based on nothing but a handshake.

And I mean that literally.