The Rise of Tudor – How Rolex Wins by Letting Tudor Dare – Episode 88
How did Tudor go from a brand you couldn't even buy in the United States to a half-billion-dollar powerhouse selling 300,000 watches a year? In this episode of Openwork, Gabe Reilly and Asher Rapkin trace the rise of Tudor — from its wilderness years in the shadow of Rolex to the 2009 reinvention that produced the Heritage Chrono, the Black Bay, the Pelagos, and an in-house movement. Along the way they unpack the ETA supply crisis, the 2008 financial crash, and Rolex's move upmarket that opened the door for Tudor to walk through.
But this isn't the usual "poor man's Rolex" conversation. Gabe and Asher argue that Tudor's real role is stranger and smarter than that: the gonzo laboratory where Rolex tests every material, case size, and business model it's too disciplined to try itself. Tudor is the black sheep by design — the pressure-release valve that lets Rolex stay conservative while quietly backfilling the market it left behind as prices climbed.
So where does it go from here? With 260-plus boutiques, celebrity wrists, and a brand that's broken into mainstream culture, Tudor looks like a company on the path to a billion dollars. The question is whether it gets there on brand alone — and whether a watch that exists relative to Rolex can ever truly stand on its own.
Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.
It is this gonzo laboratory of all of Rolex's worst possible indulgences unleashed.
This is Openwork, a look inside the watch industry, a podcast from Collective Horology.
I'm Gabe Reilly, co-founder of Collective.
And I'm Ash Arafkin, about to go on vacation.
Collective Horology is an independent watch retailer based in Ventura, California.
We carry a wide range of independent brands, including Armin Strom, Renault-Tixier, David
Kando, and more.
To learn more about us and check out our available inventory, visit CollectiveHorology.com.
You're going on vacation?
I am going on vacation.
Oh, wow.
Where are you going?
I'm going to Costa Rica.
Oh, Costa Rica.
Yeah.
I've never been.
I've never been further south than Mexico in this continent, so I'm very excited about
it.
Wow.
You've been further south in another continent?
I have been further south on other continents.
Wow.
That's my level of specificity.
Amazing.
Interesting.
Fascinating.
I'll be curious to hear what watch culture is like in Costa Rica.
I am actually genuinely curious to see what people will have on their wrists.
I've selected what I'm bringing on the trip, but that's just for you.
Well, now we have to know.
I thought we don't do that.
Well, it's not a wrist check.
Yeah, I guess it's not on my wrist.
I'm bringing my Bluefin on Polymesh, and I'm bringing my Grand Seiko 9F Quartz GMT.
Oh, wow.
All right.
Very good.
Both of those are, I think, killer vacation watches.
Travel and vacation watches, check and check, but you're not bringing a Tudor.
Interesting.
Why would that be relevant?
I would have brought a Tudor if it were me.
Well, it's relevant because today we're talking about the rise of Tudor.
It's the Tudor.
Ah, I see how I set you up for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
If I were going, I probably would bring a Tudor, actually.
No, I think a Tudor is a great vacation watch, but let's dive in.
Yeah.
We've done a few of these episodes before.
We looked at the rise of Omega.
That was a fascinating, fascinating one, and a big part of it was the rise and retreat
of Omega.
And one of the biggest competitive threats to Omega in the last decade has been Tudor.
Omega is no longer the number two brand.
They've ceded that territory to Cartier.
But when you think about Tudor, it's remarkable, the run that that brand has been on.
In the last couple of years, there's been some discussion and some analyst estimates
that sales have kind of flagged for the brand.
And Tudor, by the way, their CEO has come out publicly saying that those estimates from
Morgan Stanley and Lexiconsult are flawed and all that sort of stuff.
But did not provide any qualifying evidence.
No, of course not.
Why would they?
If you step back and take a broader view of Tudor and their business over the last 15
years, since they really reinvested in the business beginning in about 2009, reintroduced
the brand in the United States, which I would have to imagine now is one of their top markets,
if not their top market.
The run that Tudor has been on is absolutely mind blowing.
It's estimated that they're doing nearly a half billion dollars in revenue in the United
States.
And that's a huge change.
Back in 2017, when Morgan Stanley and Lexiconsult first started tracking this, they estimated
that Tudor was about a quarter billion dollar business, so $250 million in sales.
And now they're up knocking on the door of half a million, nearly doubling that, half
a billion, nearly doubling that.
So they're at about $460 million in sales based on these estimates.
But at their peak, the peak, Asher, was in 2022.
And they were estimated to have done about $570 million in revenue there.
So Tudor has become, by one metric or another, a half billion dollar business.
Yeah.
And volume's impressive too.
I mean, estimated at 300,000 units a year.
Yeah.
It's pretty remarkable.
People talk all the time about Rolex doing a million watches a year, what a huge number
that is.
Well, 300,000, a third of that, that ain't bad either.
There's nothing to blink at from a company, a brand that wasn't even available to be purchased,
at least in the United States and other major markets 15 years ago.
So really, really remarkable, the rise that they've been on.
We're going to look at the success they've had and the drivers of that success.
And I think the big question that everyone has when it comes to Tudor is, well, are they
just the poor man's Rolex?
You cannot separate Tudor from Rolex, of course, for obvious reasons, but I think it's worth
looking at the strategic role Tudor plays within the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation and relative
to Rolex, because it's complicated.
There's a lot going on there.
It is fascinating.
I mean, the whole concept of this, at least as it's told, is that Hans Wilsdorf himself
wanted to create a sub brand, an alternate brand, if you will, that would deliver at
the same quality level as a Rolex, but at a lower price point, which is a little bit
of an oxymoron, sort of, you know, but yeah, there's an internal contradiction or it makes
you wonder why are they charging what they do for Rolex?
Yeah.
I always found that to be kind of hilarious, you know, like, how do you deliver the same
but for less?
Although I suppose like we see this analog in automotive, you know, with like Lexus and
Toyota, you know, where it's in many ways a very similar product and both are high quality,
but speak to different audiences and you can make an argument that a Lexus speaks to a
Luxe audience and a Toyota speaks to, you know, a more broader audience.
And I suppose you could make that argument as well for Rolex and Tudor, but probably
not as strong a comparison.
It's more like economy and basic economy.
But as the story goes, that was the general idea, but you know, what's interesting is
after that initial launch and there was a big push to at that point for those watches
to be used in not just a civilian life, but also in military life, you know, there's a
long history of both the U.S. Navy and the Marine Nationale from France utilizing references
from Tudor and those have meaningful historical and horological importance.
There's no doubt about it.
What's interesting is for anybody who's ever followed Tudor, there was a real kind of like
a valley of ambiguity, if you will, that that came in the 60s towards the end of the 60s,
the 70s, the 80s, and certainly into the 90s, where, you know, there was this brand connection
and this brand rub from Rolex and Tudor.
And obviously, if you've ever seen a Rolex from, pardon me, a Tudor from 20, 30, 40 years
ago, a lot of the parts are even branded with the Rolex crown, for example.
So the separation of like a Tudor sub versus a Rolex sub and things like that was definitely
blurring the lines a lot more than what we see in the modern incarnation of Tudor, which,
you know, very much stands on its own two legs as a brand separate from the Rolex side
of things.
So it's an interesting, an interesting brand, because if it wasn't owned by Rolex, and that's
another sort of fascinating point, because a lot of brands in the same period of time
were handed around, changed ownership, you know, where parts of different conglomerates
were owned by different private equity owners, blah, blah, blah.
But Tudor never was.
Tudor was always owned by Rolex, even during the periods where its existence was sort of
ambiguous or ill-defined relative to its big brother.
It's still, it's still maintained.
Yeah, a lot of times the discussion around like Longines, for instance, is done relative
to Omega, but, you know, they were not always part of the same company.
Sure.
That's true of so many, right?
Like JLC or Panerai or any of the, or, you know, any of the Long, I suppose.
Yeah.
But I mean, as far as two brands that are so strongly correlated to one another or compared.
Yeah.
I think the history of Tudor and those decades of ambiguity and all that are well-documented
where things start to get interesting, and I think is the really critical framing for
our look at Tudor is really around 2009.
And so you're right.
There was this period of ambiguity and wilderness.
Tudor had exited, for instance, the United States.
I remember, you know, back in the day on the poor man's watch forum, people would talk
all the time about Rolex Submariner alternatives.
So they would talk about watches like, you know, the Invicta dive watches or an SKX 007
or what it might be.
And, you know, there are always these guys who would like, you know, had a Tudor from,
you know, when it was still sold in the U S or you could go to Canada and get a Tudor
Submariner.
And it was kind of this, like it was, it very much existed in the shadow and in comparison
to Rolex in 2009, things start to change in Switzerland at Rolex headquarters.
And they decide, you know what, we're going to get serious about Tudor and we're going
to set Tudor on this trajectory to where it's gone today.
In other words, they decide they're going to refocus on the brand.
And it had certainly wandered in the wilderness long enough.
My question is, well, why did they do it?
So they did a few things.
They appointed a new CEO.
So his name was Philippe Peverelli.
And then famously also brought in Davide Gerardo as the head of product.
And these gentlemen set the business and the product strategy on the, in the direction
in the course it is now, but why, why did they do it?
Why not just let Tudor languish?
Why not just let Tudor continue to be some kind of facsimile of, I mean, I have, I have
my theory of curious rollers.
Yeah.
So I did a little research on this and it's fascinating.
There are a couple of drivers of this.
A big one famously is the ETA movement supply crisis.
So famously in 2002 ETA warns the, of the broader industry ETA, of course, movement
supplier owned by the Swatch Group that they're going to cut off the supply of their movements
to third parties and wind this, I guess the government got involved and said, well, you're
going to do that.
This is, you know, an existential crisis for the industry.
We're going to need to wind it down over time.
So first Tudor is like, okay, well, to your point, but we don't, we have Rolex parts in
every way except the movements, right?
Now our movement supply is under threats.
We need to figure that out.
Obviously they do figure that out and by essentially creating Kinesi, which is a joint venture,
but they own a controlling stake in it and they, they develop their movement.
So that's one issue that's existential.
Tudor can't exist if it can't get movements.
So they need to figure out a new business strategy just for that one reason alone.
They need to, even though the Kinesi movements don't make their way into Tudor watches for
some time.
No, but again, there'd been this taper period, right?
Okay.
So number two, Rolex is raising their floor.
So people talk all the time about this idea that, you know, Rolex used to be these tool
watches, purpose build watches, and the brand has changed into a luxury brand and we're
not going to debate this point, but suffice it to say by the early 2000s, Rolex's future,
its present and its future is very clearly in the luxury wheelhouse.
And think about which Rolex products were coming out in this 2008, 2009 timeframe.
This is when we're starting to see upgraded six digit models.
So things like the ceramic GMT master, the sub comes out a few years later and Rolex
is clearly from a product and a brand positioning and a price standpoint, moving into clearly
and squarely a luxury positioning.
And they're leaving behind a lot of their sort of entry level pricing.
They're no longer competing head to head with say Omega, but they're moving up into a new
price point.
So this creates some opportunity for Tudor as Rolex raises their floor, they realized,
well, we have this other brand here, it's Tudor.
If we're going to create this wake, we can actually fill the very wake that we're creating
if we invest in Tudor.
Related to this is the 2008 financial crisis.
So at the same time as Rolex is pursuing this premium premiumization strategy, a bomb goes
off in the global economy and luxury goods are massively under threat.
I mean, the blow up that happened in the broader watch industry at this point in time
is well documented and it really hurt higher priced watches, especially it also created
carnage a lot of like what we're seeing today in the mid tier.
So in this sort of $5,000 and under tier and Rolex being well bankrolled, sees an opportunity
here.
We can diversify, we can not only just fill the wake we're leaving behind with Rolex by
putting Tudor in there, but we can better diversify our business at a point in time
when pursuing a luxury strategy on its own might be a little bit risky.
I mean, think about what was going on in this 2008 to 2012 period.
We were talking about there's the global recession, there was double dip recession discussion.
Double dip entered this phase of many financial crises and government debt crises that lingered
for years.
There was talk about this idea of the new normal where this was coined by Bill Gross
at PIMCO and very much popularized at the time where the global economy was entering
this phase of low growth.
So you're Rolex and you're like, all right, we moved this brand upstream.
The global economy is very uncertain.
We need to make sure we diversify our business.
We need to protect this asset we've had for decades, Tudor.
The movements are under question.
We need to get our house in order.
So there was very much, it's not just like someone at Rolex woke up one day in 2009 or
the Hans Willstor Foundation was like, dammit, we need to get serious about Tudor.
It was very much a reaction to a time and a place.
And I think that this is critical context for how we look at the role of Tudor today
because you're right.
The setup here very much means by definition, it can no longer just be a poor man's Rolex.
It can't just be Rolex parts with an ETA movement.
There's a very different role that the brand is envisioned to play going forward and they
do it masterfully.
Yeah.
Well, one of the first things when we look from a product standpoint, we've spilled a
lot of podcast ink here about where we see mistakes that Davide Tirado has made at Bremont,
but among others, among others, but, but those are not on display here.
And I think one of the most brilliant choices they made was to relaunch the brand with the
Heritage Chrono.
Yeah.
Because if you think about it, like what's the one Tudor that everybody has been asking
to see?
This was, this was Baselworld or this was earlier, this was like 2010.
So this was like the first, the first Tudor watch essentially.
And you know, I love that because it went deeper.
It went deep into the heritage of the brand to come out with something that was actually
ownable by Tudor.
You know, everyone to this day still wants to see a Tudor sub, right?
Whether they'll ever do that or not, who knows?
But one thing that Tudor, modern incarnation of Tudor has done is that they do their very
best to try and be referential, but not direct, right?
Like the FXD being of course, a reference back to fixed lugs, fixed lug mill subs.
Some of the black bays are kind of on the nose though.
Well, yeah.
Like the monochrome is getting very, very, very close to a sub, but yeah, but, but my
point is that's not where they started.
You know, they started with something that they could really dig their teeth into and
own.
The early like, like first five years, seven years of Tudor showed a lot of really interesting
risk-taking.
Remember the launch of the Kinesi movement came in the North flag, which was a completely
ownable, utterly novel watch from the brand.
Pelagos was an utterly modern watch.
Of course it had design tropes taken from Tudor Submariners from the 1970s, but very
modern and not referential in the way the black bay is.
Yeah.
Let's not forget the P01 either, which was of course another watch that was pulled from
their archives was very ownable by them, super distinct to them.
And while commercially it may not have been super successful, though, interestingly, not
a lot of them on the secondary.
So a lot of the people who bought them, I think just kept them.
The brand itself really wanted to establish that it had a personality before it really
leaned as hard into the, the black bays, which of course are the bread and butter of the
brand, which relaunched itself in 2012.
I think it's a fascinating thing when you talk about the floor of Rolex and where Tudor
fits into that.
Because when we look at where it is today, I don't know offhand what the, what the most
affordable Rolex is, but last time I checked it was somewhere around $7,000.
Is that like an Oyster Perpetual?
Yeah.
Like an Oyster Perpetual, I think it's around $7,100, $7,000, correct me, but it's, it's
in the low sevens.
That's what my Tudor Black Bay Chronograph costs.
Yeah.
And that's a substantial and complicated watch.
Sure.
But my, my point on that being roll back the clock, that's the high end of Tudor is my
point.
Yes.
But seven to 10 years ago, a Oyster Perpetual was barely $5,000.
So we've seen the floor, we've seen the floor of Rolex go up by two to three grand over
the last decade or so.
And Tudor, which started as an extraordinarily high value, I mean, early black bays were
like barely $3,000.
You know that.
Remember those days?
Yeah.
Black bays.
And then for a long time, black bays really hovered around high threes, low fours.
Yeah.
I'm always anchored to a $3,950 for a black bay 58.
That's kind of like the benchmark for years that I compared everything else to just on,
in terms of pricing.
Which is a hell of a watch for the money.
And of course those numbers have gone up and up and up and up.
Yes, they have.
You know, FXDs now are in the mid fives.
Once you started adding the chronographs, you get up to seven.
There's even a gold Tudor Black Bay, of course, famously.
You can get it on a bracelet now too.
You can.
Although the price differential there doesn't really make a lot of sense if you're considering
a gold watch.
A pre-owned gold Rolex would probably be a much better value, but I digress.
My point is where Rolex originally occupied, you know, that sort of dominated that, you
know, $5,000 to $10,000 range, because for a long time, stainless steel sports Rolex
was, you know, with the exception of maybe a Yacht-Master II or a Daytona, was all basically
between $5,000 and $10,000.
Now obviously we've blown, you know, the lid's been blown off of that.
What I find fascinating is at no point in time did Tudor market themselves as the like
value alternative.
They just went out there and tried to make their own sort of more youthful, if you will,
more playful, more experimental voice relative to their big brother, the core of who they
were.
And that's really fascinating because to me, you know, if, if, if the Rolex basement continues
to go up, then that gives tons of headroom for Tudor to start to fill in because they
never defined them.
Maybe enthusiasts define them this way, but they never defined themselves as a affordable,
you know, alternative to Rolex.
And I, the trajectory is clear in the next couple of years, there will be production
model Tudors that are $10,000 that are not made of precious metal or not made out of
ceramic or what have you, they're just stainless steel.
And that in and of itself will not only create this, you know, absorb this market that once
belonged to Rolex, but it lets Rolex do what Rolex wants to do, which is consistently raise
their average price point so that their sales are, are grown off the back of Tudor backfilling.
So I look at the money and the $300,000 watches and all of that, the revenue rather as less
of a brand unto itself.
I don't mean this as an insult to Tudor.
I mean, it is, and they deserve a lot of respect and appreciation for that, but I view it as
a way to, as stilts upon which Rolex stands to be able to continually increase their overall
profitability and change their brand profile.
Yeah.
I think another role that Tudor plays, I would agree with that description, stilts upon which
they stand.
The foundation upon which they stand.
You know, the other thing I'd say is it helps Rolex get out of rolling in the mud with Omega.
Tudor takes on that role now.
So again, the whole, the whole like METAS certification thing, exactly.
It's no coincidence that Rolex sticks with superlative chronometer and they let Tudor
take on the work, the hand-to-hand combat of being the METAS certified chronometer,
right?
Yeah.
Tudor is the brand now rolling in the mud with Omega, which again, frees up Rolex to
sort of elevate itself just from a brand positioning standpoint.
Yeah.
That's really interesting when you do consider that like the new planet ocean from the perspective
of Rolex probably competes with a black bay versus, or a METAS certified black bay.
Whereas Omega probably wants you to think it competes with the Submariner.
That's exactly right.
You know, if you ask Omega, who's your number one competitor, they're going to tell you
it's Rolex.
And you look at, just look at the, again, just as with Tudor, you know, the references
to Rolex and the products speak for themselves.
The same is very much true of Omega.
We've talked about it.
They're the yin to Rolex's yang, nearly an Omega product for almost every Rolex product.
In fact, there's like 10 Omega products for every one Rolex product.
And so Omega would say, yeah, well, our number one competitor is Rolex and Rolex would turn
around and say, how cute, you know, it's, it's, they've put, they put Tudor into, into
that position, which I think is fascinating and does tremendous brand work.
Hey, it's Gabe.
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Let's get back to the show.
I do want to go back to something you said though, which is you said, well, Tudor isn't
defining themselves as an extension of Rolex.
I think they, I mean, how do you not launch a product like the Black Bay in 2012 and then
continue in that, and then continue to develop designs that are even closer to Rolex designs
along the way, whether it's the GMT or the Black Bay Pro or things like that, and not,
if not explicitly, very clearly the relationship to Rolex is, I mean, the Black Bay Pro and
the GMT are watches that the Black Bay, you could say, sure, well, Tudor is a long tradition
of the Submariner themselves and dive watches, but then these other references, they don't,
they're clearly nodding to Rolex.
Of course they are.
Look, I think there's a difference between, I think there is a difference between utilizing
that as your core message and then simply accepting that that puts wind in your sails.
So the difference would be for me, when you go to a Tudor boutique, which more often than
not is associated with a Rolex dealer, of course, there is an obvious connection.
When you look at a Black Bay monochrome next to a five digit vintage sub, of course, there
is a connection.
They can tell you that it's a three link bracelet till they're blue in the face, but it's sure
as heck looks like an oyster bracelet.
And I think these things are intrinsic and because they are owned by Rolex, nobody's
going to accuse them of being, you know, a carbon copy because they are of themselves
in the same way that I'm going to keep using this analogy, you know, the same way that
when you get into a, a Lexus ES 300 H or a, or a Camry, the layout of the instrumentation
is essentially identical.
The infotainment system is identical.
You can't separate out the fact that they're owned, but everything else is different.
And that allows them to have like, yeah, I mean the same way that it's funny, it goes
the other way.
And in, in luxury cars, because Lexus in some way benefits from its relationship with Toyota,
even though Toyota is the more mass market and the more pervasive brand, because you're
like, Oh, finally, a luxury car that's reliable, reliable.
I know it will work, but, but I mean, but, but you know, there isn't a perfect analogy,
but I think, I think that, that, that meets the gap.
And I think that I don't, you know, say it without having to say it component of the
business is an incredibly valuable thing for them.
I'll give you an example of where that doesn't work, right?
Let's look at one of the most popular watches, apparently in the sub $5,000 category.
I'm hearing from our friends that, that sell it, which is the new Longines Hydro Conquest.
Okay.
So that's a $2,400 watch on a modified ETA movement that the majority of people who are
out there who have bought that watch, love it.
It's a heck of a lot of watch.
It is.
But if, when you take a good long look at that watch, it sure feels like a essentially
cheaper version of a Seamasters 300 or more accurately a Planet Ocean.
Or even there's, it's very Submariner looking too, with the bezel colors, it's in the same
trope.
So there are, it does make references back to past Longines dive watches and all that,
but yeah, we all know, you know, what you're getting there.
Yeah.
But my point is they don't have the fig leaf of being able to say, you know, like Longines
sure it's owned by the Swatch Group and then you have Omega.
And I'm sure at the top, the strategy sessions are clearly thinking through what they're
doing here, but in practice, you can't, you can't lean on Omega's dive watches as Longines
from a brand standpoint, the way that Tudor can and not get, not get accused of being
derivative.
Yeah.
It's fascinating.
I was reading a review.
I was very interested in those new Hydro Conquest watches.
When we were over at the Topanga mall, we wandered into the, into the Longines boutique
to take a look.
They didn't have them there.
I wanted to check them out, but I was reading this interview, this review of the watches.
I can't remember where it was.
It was on one of the major watch, you know, blogs, whether it was Hodinkee or a blog to
watch or something like that.
And they compared the Hydro Conquest to the Submariner in terms of its layout and the
bezel colors and things like that in sort of a derisive way, or like kind of thumbing
their nose at the watch, looking down on it.
Like that's great, but it just feels like it's kind of this facsimile of a Submariner.
I wish it was more different.
And so that's a knock on the watch, whereas with Tudor, the fact that it's kind of like
a Submariner is a positive.
And if anything, people are saying like, actually, I wish this watch was more like a Submariner.
I wish the proportions were more like a Submariner.
It was thinner.
I wish maybe rather than guilt or instead of lack of guilt, it had like all of these
things.
It's fascinating.
But there's also more to it.
The psychology of that is just wild.
Oh, for sure.
There's a lot more to it that I think is a significant element of the growth and success
of Tudor, especially in the first decade, which are two factors.
One, Tudor was and still is willing to experiment and take risk faster and at greater hypothetical
risk than Rolex.
Another role they play.
Yes.
And in certain degrees, I suspect they play as the R&D playground for Rolex.
Like the use of titanium by the Rolex corporation first appeared in the Pelagos.
And let me ask you, when I had real talk here, you really think there'd be no titanium yacht
master without.
No, I don't think that at all.
But I still think that what they've learned in machining and building and making watches
in titanium can't have not informed it.
Yeah.
But Tudor relies on suppliers for that.
Rolex does that all.
I get that.
But my point is, it's still the first time they worked in that material in under the
Rolex umbrella.
Sure.
I, I, I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one conversation between.
There weren't any.
It's a guarantee.
It's a firewall.
Between Tudor and Rolex.
And same thing.
We, we've never seen ceramic as a, you know, as a watch case or bracelet from Rolex before,
but we see that with Tudor.
And then there's one other thing that Tudor did, which was brilliant.
And to this day is I still think is critical to the growth of their brand, which is the
corporate deals.
Now this is something that Rolex had historically done, right?
This is another wake left by.
Yes.
And Rolex didn't do this at the same accelerated pace that, that the modern Tudor does.
But of course there are very famous examples of things like, you know, the, the Domino's
pizza Rolex, which went from being sort of curiosities to being seriously collectible
in the last decade or so.
Seen one of those.
Yeah.
Oh, cool.
Sure.
I mean, I, you could buy them from, from HQ Milton, like 15 years ago for 2,500 bucks.
No one wanted them.
It's the people would be like, why would I want a luxury watch?
It's a Domino's pizza.
Jeremy Kirkland have a Domino's pizza Rolex at one point.
It sounds like it's in his wheelhouse.
It's probably his jam.
Jeremy, let us know.
But my point is separate from that, Rolex or Tudor did lean into that.
I mean, that's how we got our start as a company by making the Facebook Tudor.
And, you know, there's been countless versions from the metropolitan police to, to, uh, musicians
making, Ed Sheeran did this for, for everyone who was on his tour, you know, to, to any
number of different companies, some of which publicly are okay with sharing that and others
are not.
But that created essentially this, this sub category of Tudor, which I think did two things.
One, it created a mythology, you know, and the mythology is critical to the brand's growth.
There's some really fascinating blog posts, Instagram, carousel posts, things like that
of like tracking these watches down.
And there are some really good ones, really fast.
There's some really, really good ones, you know?
And like one of my favorites, which I actually had the pleasure of owning was one for Apple
employees, which had the Jolly Roger on it, which was a very deep cut for, for Apple employees
in the history of that flag for the company.
Super fricking cool.
Anyway, putting that aside, it created a mythology and the mythology fed to the bed
the brand, both for those who are, who are able to buy those watches, but also for people
just knowing that that was a thing, because what happens when a watch collector finds
out about a thing that nobody else knows about or that there's little information, they go
hunting.
Yeah.
It's catnip.
Absolutely.
And when they go hunting, they inevitably learn about the brand.
And if they learn about the brand, that's about the best possible opportunity you have
to convert somebody.
So that's, that's bucket number one.
What's in the other bucket?
Well dead fish.
Yeah.
How'd you know?
Chum.
Exactly.
But in all seriousness, so you have, you have that, but then you also have, I think a really
well attuned sense, maybe not of what everybody wants, but certainly of what will sell.
And okay.
Yeah.
Good point.
Right.
Because everybody always makes this joke about Tudor where it's like, you know, you're going
to, you know, the watch show comes up, you know, it's, it's watches and wonders.
And everybody's like, is this the year of the Submariner?
It's like, Nope, this is the year of an FXD GMT, you know, or like this is the year of
a 50 or 30, uh, how much is the Black Bay 50?
What's the smaller one?
The Black Bay.
Oh, the 54.
Thank you.
You know, like here's your, you know, your, your 38, seven millimeter or whatever it is,
you know, diver, which is cool for a very particular type of person.
But anyway, the reason I bring this up is they built it because there was an audience
for that, not because it's what the collectors were clamoring for, which I think is very
insightful because one thing you and I have seen as, as watch retailers is that often
what people say they will buy is not what they end up buying.
Especially if they say, if I would buy this, if only for that.
And then a brand does that.
And they're like, yeah, I don't really want that anymore.
Yep.
We're at a million times.
Absolutely.
Whereas Tudor is just like, I'm going to just make the thing that I think there's a market
for and sell it.
Like the Royal is sort of the, what to me is the most interesting watch that they released
this year because they clearly, clearly have a good idea of who that is for.
Even if that's a watch that nobody asked for.
So essentially if you feed the mythology and you build the brand and then you send someone
down and out the rabbit hole deep enough that they may even know the context of the Royal
how they may want it.
And that to me is some brilliant brand building.
Even if they, even if the brand was born with a, you know, silver spoon in its mouth.
Yeah.
So, you know, going back to this whole notion of the poor man's Rolex, I think that's not
the right metaphor anymore, but I think about it, I was going to say, you know, like, oh,
you know, Tudor is like a caricature of Rolex, you know, it's like Submariner's 40 millimeters.
Well, the black Bay is 15 millimeters thick and 41 millimeters, you know, in diameter
or, you know, you make watches in, in steel and gold.
Well, we make watches and forged carbon and ceramic and all these other things.
But I actually, I don't even think that's the right way of describing it.
You've put your finger on it, which is this idea that Tudor's role is actually to kind
of be like the, the crazy degenerate black sheep brothers, younger sibling of Rolex.
In other words, like do all the things that Rolex won't do and just see where, see where
it goes.
And I was like, didn't Bill Clinton have like a degenerate younger brother, Roger Clinton,
you know, who was like, oh, he's like had a checkered past and was in legal trouble
and things like things like this.
I don't know, man.
And so he's like, you know, Tudor is like the Roger Clinton in that.
It takes chances.
It takes risks.
It's not so like Rolex won't do stamped dials anymore.
No, Tudor will do it for anyone who shows up with the, with enough money, you know,
more or less, you know, certainly more liberal than Rolex.
Much more liberal.
You know, Rolex is conservative in its use of materials.
Tudor isn't.
Rolex has these iconic watches where they've showed so much discipline around not bloating
their skews.
You know, think about the Submariner.
Yes.
Of course there's the Submariner, there's the date, there's the no date, there's the
green bezel, there's the precious, but like Rolex could, the Submariner family is like
tight.
It's pretty tight for what it is.
GMT master is extremely tight for what it is.
Tudor is unconstrained.
You want a black Bay and one size, another size, one metal two-tone green dial.
This is my point.
Like that level of willingness to experiment must inform some of Rolex's high, like risk
taking of late as well.
That's my point.
It's like they have this, they had this degenerate younger brother or this like pressure release,
and I say that with love and affection, they have this pressure release valve that allows
them to have their cake and eat it too.
They're allowed to leave the, the, you know, kind of the mid range of the watch market
and fill that wake.
They're allowed to be really disciplined and tightly controlled about product and not bloating
their skews on the Rolex side, but do that with Tudor, you know, whereas Omega just gets
bashed on for having too many skews and limited editions and things like that.
So Tudor is, you know, people talk about Tudor as like, oh, well, you know, it's this laboratory
of experimentation of material and design.
And that's kind of true.
That's true relative to Rolex, but that's only one aspect of it.
It is this Gonzo laboratory of all of Rolex's like worst possible indulgences unleashed
through a different, like Rolex is so disciplined, Tudor allows them to do the things they would
never allow themselves to do and learn from it.
And it's not, my point is it's not just materials, it's business models as well.
It's it's case sizes, it's designs, it's all sorts of stuff.
It's not just like, thank God for Tudor because otherwise we'd never have a titanium watch
from Rolex.
I think the learning is much more, is much broader and it allows this organization to
have its cake and eat it too.
It allows the Hans Wilsdorf foundation, which is extremely conservative and outlet for risk
taking, which leads, I think, to the final point.
So now we're half a billion dollar business, 300,000 watches a year, is that not 1700 doors
across 100 countries?
Get this 260 plus dedicated boutiques.
There you go.
Can you believe I, I saw that number of my jaw hit the floor.
Yeah.
I find that to be a lot, but, but putting that aside for one second, it is a lot.
Now we enter into a different phase, which is the future of the brand.
Yeah.
And the question for me now really boils down to over the next 15 years, is this really
a backfill for Rolex or can it stand on its own two legs or both?
And that I think is a interesting question from a product innovation standpoint and from
a brand standpoint.
Well, I think the brand has broken through in the mainstream culture and I think the
260 boutiques is a good example of that.
You know, you walk down any high street or, you know, really fancy mall, you know, go,
you go to Las Vegas, there are two dedicated Tudor boutiques.
There's one at the Caesars forum shops.
There's one at the Venetian and they're among all the other major watch brands and all the
other luxury brands.
Tudor is a luxury brand that stands on its own two legs.
The whole reason we're doing this podcast, the whole reason we're doing it is went to
the movie theaters, movie theater the other week to check out jackass and guess who's
wearing a Tudor black Bay.
Oh, really?
Johnny Knoxville.
Now, what's interesting about the new jackass movie is they have a new and original stunts,
but they also have like a retrospective of some of their greatest stunts and some unreleased
stuff from the last 20 plus years.
And on the wrists of the jackass guys, you kind of see this look into leading watch brands
from the last 2025 years.
So for instance, there's an early clip from the early 2000s of Steve-O.
That's actually a stunt where Johnny Knoxville is riding on a rocket that launches.
But Steve-O is wearing a Day-Date, gold Day-Date.
There's some footage of Ryan Dunn who's, who passed away, but he's wearing what looks like
a, it's like a Breitling chronograph.
This would have been also from like the mid 2000s.
And you see these watches like gold Rolex, it's 2008 or so.
Someone's wearing a big Breitling chronograph.
Of course, like these are, these are just watches that were popular and in culture and
were cool for a guy to wear who's just a guy or aspiring to something nice.
Now in 2026, Johnny Knoxville is it's a, it was a, one of the bronze with the blue dial
a black base.
And I'm like, holy smokes, like this brand has penetrated popular culture.
I see tutors on the wrists of people who don't even know that much.
It used to be, if you saw someone wearing a tutor, you could stop them and talk to them
about watches.
And it was like guaranteed.
Yeah.
You tried to do that in Vegas.
I don't want to go there, but like, you know, you talk to, you talk to anyone wearing a
tutor, it's like guaranteed they're an enthusiast.
I was out having a beer the other day and the guy was wearing a black Bay monochrome
and he didn't even know what he was wearing.
It was like, that's just a cool watch.
I really like it.
And the brand has broken through.
The question I think is very similar to what Grand Seiko is on is like, can they sustain?
Can they grow the base even, even bigger?
Can this get to be a billion dollar brand?
The moves that they're making, the chess moves on the board, the 260 boutiques, the 1,700
doors, the distribution, the sponsorships.
It all suggests that this is a brand on the path to a billion dollars, but can they get
there?
Is enough with the enthusiast audience?
Well, see, this is my theory.
I think they, I think they will get to a billion dollars, but I think they're going to do it
off the back of average price increase, not increase in volume because that's the trajectory
they're on.
And isn't that the trajectory the whole industry is on?
That's my point though, which is, I think they have broken through, but you think tutors
a top of mind, mainstream watch brand for an average guy who's out to buy a nice watch
the way a Rolex or an Omega is.
Yes.
But they run, I do, but I think they run the risk of outpricing themselves.
And that I think, because at a certain point in time, you start to wonder, should I consider
something else?
Part of the reason that role that tutor was so strong was that for 3950, a black Bay 58,
I mean, you and I used to refer to this as the tutor test.
If we were looking at an independent watch, we were thinking of picking up, it was in
the same general price point.
If somebody, you know, if, if somebody annoyingly asked us like, well, for that money, I could
get a tutor, would they be right?
And from a, from a, you know, quality or production or whatever, just a value standpoint, am I
getting like, you know, the tutor is built in one way to one standard, like another independent
watch isn't going to be 200 meters in water resistance, but does it offer comparable value?
Is that more interesting from a design standpoint or whatever it might be?
But if a black Bay becomes a six, seven, eight, $9,000 watch.
Now you're playing in a different field and you've also excluded a significant amount
of buyers because the same flow, I would, I would argue that a lot of the same folks
who were lining up to buy tutors 10 years ago.
Are the ones lining up to buy the Longy and hydro conquest today, because there's so little
available below $5,000, you know, $4,000, really that, that offers a lot of the features
that we see in those watches that feel robust.
That also offer like, you know, the, this, the, uh, the whiff of luxury and all of those
things.
Isn't a hydro conquest, half the price, $2,400, $2,500, something like that, depending how
you configure it less than quarts and, and, you know, kudos, by the way, to Longines for
realizing that there was a door left wide open that they could walk through.
So like respect to Longines for sure, which is another brand we should talk about because
they are, they are, and have been for the last 10 years doing a ton of work to like,
to blow off the dust and really focus on their growth.
But anyway, that's my real question, which is at what point does the tutor buyer tap
out?
At what point does the tutor buyer say, Oh man, 8,500 bucks.
There are Rolex is available for that.
The counterfactual to that would be.
Tutor maybe doesn't want to tutor wants less of the price conscious dialed enthusiast buyer
and wants more of a mainstream luxury audience.
Oh, I get what they want.
I'm just saying at what point does the consumer say, I'm good because there is a big gap between
somebody looking at a 39 50 watch that they've saved up for.
I know I was that guy versus somebody who views it as like a Lark and is willing to
buy it because they think it's neat, but the money is not as, as much of an issue.
Yeah.
But what I would say is what they're looking for are.
It's neither, it's neither of those.
It's people buying on brand, you know, people will pay up for, oh, that's interesting.
People will pay up for a Breitling for instance, you know, you compare what a Breitling watch
with a B zero one movement costs, like a chronograph relative to what a tutor black.
So you think it's more like buying an LVMH, like a Louis Vuitton bag where it's like,
sure there are, you could get a much finer leather bag from somebody, but this one's
a Louis Vuitton.
This is my point about the jackass thing is like, you're just a cool dude.
20 years ago, you were wearing a R a gold Rolex or a Breitling.
Now in 2026, you're a cool dude.
You're wearing a tutor.
Yeah.
And I think that what they're.
My theory here is like the audience they're chasing and the reason they're investing in
their brand and the boutiques and the advertising, the sponsorships, the celebrity endorsements
and things like that is because they're ultimately trying to get a brand conscious
audience buying their watches.
You know, it's like you were going to roll into the Breitling boutique, but you wander
over to tutor instead.
Not like, not like, oh, I'm a w I I've done my research or I'm a watch enthusiast.
And I know that tutor is part of Rolex and, you know, offers tremendous value the way
like a hydro conquest does or the black bay did traditionally, I think for them to get
to a billion dollars, they have to, they have to have the average customer just be someone
who's buying on brand.
And I think my question with that, I think they're getting there.
My question.
Is so much of their opera, so much of their identity exists relative to Rolex that can
they really get there?
Can they stand on their own two feet or in the mind of, because here's the, here's the
paradox.
Someone who buys on brand is brand conscious.
Can a brand conscious person get over the fact that it's not a Rolex?
I don't know.
That is, that is the million dollar question in my mind, the billion dollar question in
my mind for tutor.
So we leave it there.
We'll leave it there.
We'll have to see where the, where this goes, but kudos to tutor.
They have built an absolutely killer business.
We'd love the watches.
And from a business standpoint, I'm absolutely in awe of what they've done.
And I cannot wait to see where they take it here, here, right here, here.
You're just nodding along.
It's an audio medium.
You have to say you're here.
Well, thank you so much for listening.
Open work is of course a production of collective horology.
You can find us online, collective horology.com.
We don't carry tutor, but we have 20 plus independent watch brands.
Check them out and please get in touch with your questions, feedback, suggestions, show
topic ideas.
Am I really having to get my ideas for show topics from jackass?
Come on people to do that.
You can email us at podcast at collective horology.com.
Rejected.