How Rolex Makes a New Watch

It takes Rolex five to seven years to create a new watch model, I just learned.

It’s Mar. 24 and I’m sitting in the Geneva headquarters of the most important watchmaker in the world, with the platinum version of its brand-new, not-yet-announced Rolex Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller in my hands. It’s a fresh entry in a lineage that includes such legends as the Datejust, the GMT-Master II, the Submariner and the Cosmograph Daytona. The Land-Dweller, which also comes in steel and rose gold, looks a bit like a Datejust — with a glittering fluted bezel, a cyclops bubble over the date window and a metal bracelet with a mix of link sizes and textures. Of course, on second glance, any aficionado will see there’s a world of difference. More on that later.

I was summoned to this top secret meeting to discover the wonders of this new timepiece. A week later, the Land-Dweller will be introduced during the Watches and Wonders trade fair across town, and within minutes of its debut, collectors and fans around the world will be dissecting its every nook, tick and cranny. Naturally, leaks will precede the actual launch, heightening the hype.

That’s because a totally new collection from Rolex is a rare thing indeed. Like fellow luxury juggernauts Porsche or Hermès, Rolex’s great strength is that it rarely changes much. You need to be able to look at a watch and immediately know it’s a Rolex — and that the wearer is the kind of person who owns such a thing. The company tweaks its core products gradually over time, causing fans to line up behind the tiniest modifications (a different numeral shape here, a new bezel material there, and many internal technical updates that never even get announced) and pledge allegiance to the same models that have existed since the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

And, boy, do people care about this stuff. The company sold about 1.2 million watches in 2024 for a total of nearly 10.6 billion CHF ($11.5 billion), according to estimates by Morgan Stanley and the Swiss firm LuxeConsult. That represents 30 percent of the sales of the entire Swiss industry. There are millions of people walking around planet Earth wearing a Rolex right now, and yet most people who want one still think they can’t get one. (That perception is partly a vestige of pandemic-induced scarcity, but mostly it’s mostly a function of Rolex’s canny marketing strategy.) The elusiveness makes folks care even more.

It matters what these people, the owners and the dreamers, think of the Land-Dweller. Not me. But here I am, a journalist in the brand’s inner sanctum, its Geneva manufacture (code for factory), and all eyes are on me. I’m sitting with two PR people, and Rolex’s heads of design and research and development, plus the brand’s historian for an early peek at the product. These are not public figures; they don’t do interviews; this sort of meeting very rarely happens. Rolex is like the CIA in that way: Its people don’t speak — its reputation does. I kind of can’t believe I’m here.

I left New York humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” mostly because I spent part of that morning watching “The Wizard of Oz” with my 4-year-old daughter. But when I pulled up in my Uber to the Rolex HQ, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, like Dorothy, I was about to meet some great and powerful figures in the shadows. The names of Olivier Greim, the head of research and development for Rolex, and Davide Airoldi, the head of design, aren’t listed on the company’s website, and there are no mentions of them in Google news. As far as the internet is concerned, they do not exist.

The Rolex headquarters, in Geneva’s Les Acacias neighbourhood, rises up from a grassy lawn and rows of leafy trees. In front is an administrative tower in glimmering green, the brand’s favourite colour, topped by its famous five-pointed crown logo. Behind are a set of expansive, glassy black factory buildings where final assembly and intensive testing takes place. This is not where Rolex smelts its gold (yes, that’s right, Rolex has its own foundry just outside town, in Plan-Les-Ouates), nor is it where most of the movements are made (that’s a couple of hours north, in Biel). But this is where the plans are made and the dreams are dreamed.

When I walked inside, the green motif continued. The lobby chairs, tables, and welcome desk were all a shade of dewy emerald — no, malachite. Even the light through the windows seems green.

It’s not not Oz.

The story of the Land-Dweller started at least five years ago, when the office of general management issued a brief to the design and development teams describing the contours of a watch they were to create. (Jean-Frédéric Dufour celebrates 10 years as Rolex’s CEO in 2025.) The memo contained inspirational earthbound images—a line drawing of a futuristic city, maybe Dubai, plus a photograph of a grassy cliff, maybe Ireland. The idea was that a new product would share nomenclature with the Sea-Dweller dive watch and the Sky-Dweller calendar watch, with its two time zones for jet setters. Of course, most people wearing a Sea-Dweller aren’t using it to dive. They’re wearing it as they type on their laptop or go out to dinner. The Land-Dweller is meant to honour these people: ones who live in the real world.

Rolex, naturally, says it in a more heroic-sounding way. “The Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller is designed for those well-grounded men and women who build their own destinies,” the press materials read, “seeing opportunity in every moment.”

The General Management’s brief said the watch should be modern but take design inspiration from the integrated bracelet model that began with the reference 5100, a quartz Rolex from 1969 beloved by aficionados, and the ref. 1630, a two-tone mechanical Datejust from 1974 with angled bracelet links. “It is important to say that the new watch is not a revival,” Rolex head of heritage Christophe Carrupt tells me as he shows me the vintage models. “But it is inspired by the DNA of the brand.”

And, for increased precision and durability in timekeeping, the watch should beat at 5 hertz. A typical Rolex beats at 4 Hz, or eight times per second. A 5 Hz model beats at ten vibrations per second, or 36,000 an hour. “That was the assignment,” explains Greim, the head of R&D. “When you raise the frequency from 4 to 5 Hz, the watch is less sensitive to movements, to accelerations, to shock.” In other words, the watch can retain Rolex’s famed precision for longer. But amping up the tempo consumes more energy. “We had to redesign our regulating system,” Greim continues. “And so came a new escapement, which is, we believe, a small revolution in this world.”

Finally, the brief said the movement needed to be thinner—which meant more engineering work and problem-solving. The result was the Calibre 7135, with 16 new related patents. (Including the bracelet and other design elements, there were 32 patent applications for the watch.)

The Land-Dweller, coming in 40 millimetre and 36mm cases, is offered in the brand’s proprietary Everose (pink) gold, platinum and a white Rolesor model, a combination of Oystersteel and white gold. Some platinum and Everose models also have diamonds around the bezel and as hour markers. Prices will range from $14,900 for the white Rolesor model, a relatively entry-level point for Rolex, to $63,500 for the platinum and $88,300 for the 36mm Everose with 44 trapeze-cut diamonds and 10 diamonds as hour markers.

“The brief is never very precise,” says Airoldi, the head of design. “It takes the design team to make it precise.”

Here are the details the R&D and Design teams came up with for the final product:

The Fluted Bezel

“The number and the size of flutes help us to give to each model a different character,” explains Airoldi, of what is one of Rolex’s most iconic design elements. “For example, if you take the 1908 we launched two years ago, the bezel has 180 flutes, very small flutes,” which gives that watch a very classic, traditional look, he says. The Day-Date 40mm has 72 flutes, which means they’re bigger and more glittery. The Land-Dweller only has 60, for an even more modern look.

The Flat Jubilee Bracelet

A traditional Rolex “jubilee” bracelet is a five-piece link setup, with two thicker outer semi-circular links flanking three smaller, round inner links. In this modified version, the links are flat and appear to flow out of the sides of the case in a continuous line. “The shape of the links of the bracelet is a consequence of the shape of the case,” Airoldi says, explaining why the links have more severe angles than the traditional jubilee. “It’s sharp-edge, but it remains very comfortable.” A concern with flat or angled bracelet links is that they will catch your arm hair in them, but in my testing, this wasn’t the case. While the bigger links have a lush, technical satin finish — which Airoldi tells me is achieved with a harder, deeper brush—the corner of the links is chamfered and polished smooth. And thanks to a new mechanism inside the bracelet joint, no screws are visible on the outside of the lugs.

The Honeycomb Dial

I predict this will be the most controversial feature of this watch. Every version of it, whether it’s the ice-blue dial on the platinum edition or the white dial on the others, has a laser-engraved elongated hexagonal pattern. It can look a little busy. Airoldi points out that a hexagon is the exact shape of a flute on the bezel, only flattened. Mind: blown.

The Hands and Hour Markers

The hour and minute hands are new for Rolex, almost perfectly straight lines with luminescent material (lume) in them. The second hand has a small hexagon at its anchor end, echoing the dial pattern. One of the watch’s patents is for the way the hour markers contain their lume while remaining open-ended on each side. The non-diamond versions of the watch only have two numerals — 9 and 6.

The Dynapulse Escapement

Rolex didn’t just rely on design flourishes to set this timepiece apart. The thinner movement and 5 Hz requirement meant a new escapement was needed. An escapement is the device that transfers energy from the watch’s mainspring to the timekeeping at a steady rate by evenly releasing a gear train over and over. “This new escapement is a small revolution, because most of the watchmakers are using the traditional Swiss anchor, which was developed in 17th Century,” Greim says. “We improved it.”

The Swiss anchor uses a two-pronged fork that bounces back and forth, catching the teeth of a single escapement gear as it turns—the fork is what keeps the beat steady. Most Rolexes use a Chronergy escapement, which is an in-house evolution of the Swiss anchor. Now, Greim’s team has created the Dynapulse, which features a beautiful, tiny pair of silicon distribution wheels (instead of one metal gear) which have both teeth and blades on the same plane so they interact with one another while moving the impulse rocker (which replaces the old metal fork to keep timekeeping steady). All of this adds up to a second hand that moves extremely smoothly, and an action that’s more resistant to strong magnetic fields.

Ceramic Balance Staff and Paraflex Shock Absorbers

Additional patents are related to the ultra-hard, ultra-smooth ceramic balance staff in the middle of the oscillator, and updated shock absorbers that keep the whole thing from being affected by jolts or sudden movements.

Sapphire Caseback

Rolex is moving more and more into exhibition casebacks, which can also be found in the 1908 model line it launched in 2023. For a long time, the sturdy Rolex movements were hidden from view — the technology inside wasn’t the point, really — but with innovations like the Dynapulse, and the trend of watchmakers at every price point employing see-through casebacks, the brand has decided to show off its work. You can see some of the tiny escapement at work through the back, but I wished you could see more.

Since I had some time with the wonderful wizards of Rolex, I asked them about how they work. The design team, under Airoldi, is 18 people including modellers and workers with other skills, but six pure designers. Airoldi himself came not from the watch world, but from automaker Alfa Romeo, where he worked in the design centre in Milan. “It was not such a big change,” he tells me. “The product is not the same, but the techniques and the tools we use to design a car, to design a watch, are more or less the same.” He’s been at Rolex for 16 years.

As for Greim, he came to Rolex from multinational tobacco company Philip Morris 12 years ago. “I was always passionate about watches,” he says. He doesn’t say how many people work under him in R&D when I ask, but it is “under 400.”

Both men are soft-spoken and unassuming. But it’s clear they know how much their work matters to people — and how seriously they take their responsibilities.

I ask why a yellow gold version of the Land-Dweller wasn’t on offer in the first round, considering collectors love yellow gold these days. They remind me that they started planning this watch five years ago, and they have a product pipeline for the collection that extends beyond 2030. “It’s a strategic decision made by the commercial department, not an aesthetic decision,” Greim explains. “In yellow gold it is beautiful. We had a prototype. But the decision was to start with the small collection.”

In other words, they already have the next five years of debuts and variations in the Land-Dweller line all queued up. Stay tuned for yellow gold, I guess, and potentially other materials. Though Rolex works only in metal cases traditionally, Greim says they’ve been playing with nonmetal cases for possible use down the line. “Our job is to manage a portfolio of projects for short, mid and long term, and to be one step ahead,” he says. So depending on the requests from general management, his team can respond quickly. “We can also propose things which maybe didn’t exist.”

Does that mean Rolex will start offering complications such as tourbillons, perpetual calendars or minute repeaters — the kind of glitzy high horology that some of the other vaunted Swiss watchmakers specialise in to impress collectors and create a halo around their products? “Of course we have ideas, but it’s not our priority today,” Greim says. “Our priority is robust, simple, reliable, recognisable functions — and to be beautiful.” Put more simply: “Our watches are tools. They indicate time.”

In other words, they’re for everyday heroes doing everyday things. Land dwellers.

Does Rolex take requests from their dealers or from collectors or fans on the internet when designing new product? Airoldi says the company does listen to feedback — and it’s fun to read internet commentary, even though it’s often unkind. “But our decisions are not influenced by their will,” he says.

“We need to be aware of the comments.” Greim adds. “We’re not following the trends. We define trends.”

By Chris Rovzar

Learn more:

Vanguart: How an Eight-Year-Old Startup Sells $200,000 Watches

Scarcity, innovation and the right investors have allowed Vanguart, Biver and other young brands to build top-end watchmaking businesses from scratch.