In the age of digital everything, the Rolex brand of mechanical AAA+ replica watches keep on ticking. What’s the secret to its success?
A 2020 episode of the PBS television series “Antiques Roadshow” featured an Air Force veteran learning that the Rolex watch he’d bought nearly 50 years earlier for $345.95 was a rare watch, estimated to be worth as much as $700,000. The shocked veteran playfully pretended to faint and a video of the segment went viral, collecting 16 million views to date.
The watch in question was made in 1971, an Oyster watch descended from the world’s first waterproof wristwatch, invented by Rolex in 1926. The price the veteran paid is cheap by today’s standards, but at the time about equal to a month’s salary. The best selling Rolex copy watches were in perfect condition, barely worn.
What made it especially valuable was that Paul Newman, a Hollywood megastar, had prominently worn that high quality fake Rolex watches in the 1969 hit “Winning,” a film about the high-stakes world of car racing where seconds count.
More than 50 years later—to millions of watch dealers, collectors, and enthusiasts—the top replica watches are today known as the “Paul Newman Rolex Daytona.” (The actual watch, the one Newman owned and wore in the film, sold in 2017 for nearly $18 million.)
In the history of modern retailing, there are few luxury brands that have survived a century or more and retained their cache—think Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Cartier. None have the clout that Rolex has in its category.
Luxury watches have long been a status purchase, but about a decade ago—around the time that China was beginning to boom and minting a generation of new wealth—prices of vintage watches began to shoot up and the market for new AAA+ fake Rolex watches exploded.
Expensive brand-name watches in general became a pseudo-investment category, much like gold. Examples like the one that showed up in Fargo, North Dakota on Antiques Road Show fueled frenzied trading in vintage watches, flipping of new watches, and rampant counterfeiting.
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