The Best-Selling Watch of All Time is Not a Rolex
This shocking alternative has sold over 100 million units
This shocking alternative has sold over 100 million units
Rolex is renowned all over the world as a household name in timepiece manufacturing, the gold standard to most. It currently produces around 800,000 watches per year.
However, one watch brand sells, on average, more than 3 times that amount.
If Rolex was to hand over their 5-pointed crown to anyone, it would undoubtedly be given to Casio. The best-selling watch brand of our time.
With an estimated 109 million units sold since 1983, the Casio G-Shock has a right to the throne — but for how long?
The Rise of G-Shock
Launched in 1983 as ‘the toughest watch of all time’, the G-Shock or ‘gravitational shock’ was the brainchild of Casio engineer Kikuo Ibe and his aptly named ‘Team Tough’.
Distraught over a broken pocket watch, that was given to him by his father, Ibe decided to create the world’s first ultra-durable timepiece.
His philosophy was coined ‘the triple 10’. The watch needed to:
Be water-resistant up to 10 bar.
Survive a 10m drop.
Have a 10-year battery life.
2 years and 200 prototypes later, the G-Shock DW5000-C was born. With rubber-casing inspired by a ‘bouncy ball’, the G-Shock created a category and made other watches look fragile.
In August of 2017, Casio celebrated its 100millionth sale of a G-Shock watch with average sales of around 3 million units per year.
Impressive stats but is Casio’s reign short-lived?
Here comes the Apple Watch
In 2017, as Casio was celebrating its 100millionth sale of G-Shock, Apple was celebrating a total of 33 million watches sold, since launching in April 2015.
That seems like a large number, however, Apple sold almost that many watches in 2019 alone — 30.7million. That’s more than all Swiss watch manufacturers combined.
With the adoption of a younger audience and an immersive ecosystem, Apple may have just stolen the crown from Casio.
With strong Q1 sales, despite a pandemic, Apple was projected to have sold a total of 30.4million watches in 2020. If those sales continued, it would bring their total sales to 116million units in just 5 short years. 7million more units sold than G-Shock.
With annual unit sales that are 10 times greater than Casio’s, it was only a matter of time before Apple took over.
Just as G-Shock created its own category of watches in 1983, Apple has forged its own too — and there seems to be no stopping them.
Now, purists and horologists could argue that the Apple Watch isn’t a watch. It’s a device. It receives notifications, texts, calls etc. It’s an extension of your phone.
It tracks your fitness efforts, your sleep, your goals and your location. It pays for coffee, breakfast and necessities via Apple Pay. It controls your music. It can even tell you if your grandparents have fallen — that’s not a joke.
With that in mind, the bombshell today is that the best-selling watch of all time… probably isn’t a watch at all.