Rolex is a very popular Swiss company that manufactures very high quality and expensive luxury watches. This company has an important place in the history of watch making and is one of the most popular watch makers of all time. The company ranks #71 on BusinessWeek’s magazine’s list of one hundred most valuable brands worldwide. Producing an incredible 2,000 watches a day, Role is also the largest luxury watch brand in the world. Rolex watches were worn by both the first woman to swim across the English Channel and the organizer of the Great Escape, respectively.

Rolex Watch

The company was born in 1905 in London, then known as “Wilsdorf and Davis” and began as a business by Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis, in which the two would import Hermann Aegler’s Swiss movements to England. Three years later, the brothers in law renamed their company “Rolex”, a name that was actually made up. In 1919, the company was moved to Geneva, Switzerland due to taxes and export duties negatively affecting the business. In 1931, the company offered the public its first self-winding Rolex wristwatch, making watch-winding obsolete. Rolex also participated in the creation of the original quartz watch movements, despite not using the movement a lot themselves.

In 1944, Wilsdorf’s wife died, after which he created the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation where he kept all of his Rolex shares and made sure that a part of the company’s profit would go to charity. His company would go on to create the first watch resistant to water out to 100 meters. That was just the start of the company’s passion in creating watches perfect for extreme conditions such as deep-sea diving, aviation, and mountain climbing. The company produced the Explorer and Explorer II, which were specifically made for explorers who would navigate rough terrain.

Rolex is by far the largest producer of Swiss certified chronometers. More then half of the annual production of COS C certified watches was credited to Rolex in 2005. Even now, Rolex continues to hold the record for the most certified chronometer movements. The company also sells cheaper watches under the Tudor brand name, but tits sales in America were discontinued in 2004, although sales continued in Europe and Asia. Rolex watches are also some of the world’s expensive, selling from 7,000 USD onward.