Behind the new Rolex Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller is 5 years of designing and engineering

It takes Rolex five to seven years to create a new watch model, I just learned. It is March 24, and I am sitting in the Geneva headquarters of the watchmaker with the platinum version of its brand-new, not-yet-announced Rolex Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller in my hands. It is a fresh entry in a lineage that includes such legends as the Datejust, the GMT-Master II, the Submariner and the Cosmograph Daytona. 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 in the Swiss city, and within minutes of its debut, collectors and fans around the world will be dissecting it. A totally new collection from Rolex is a rare thing. 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 is 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. Rolex sold about 1.2 million watches in 2024 for a total of nearly 10.6 billion Swiss francs (US$11.5 billion), according to estimates by US financial holding company Morgan Stanley and Swiss firm LuxeConsult. That represents 30 per cent of the sales of the entire Swiss watch 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 cannot get one. That perception is partly a vestige of pandemic-induced scarcity, but mostly it is 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. 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. 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. 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 reference 1630, a two-tone mechanical Datejust from 1974 with angled bracelet links. And, for increased precision and durability in timekeeping, the watch should beat at five hertz. A typical Rolex beats at four Hz, or eight times per second. A five Hz model beats at 10 vibrations per second, or 36,000 an hour. “That was the assignment,” explains Olivier Greim, the head of research and development for Rolex. “When you raise the frequency from four to five 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. View this post on Instagram A post shared by ROLEX (@rolex) 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. The Land-Dweller, coming in 40 millimetre (1.6 inch) 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 US$14,900 for the white Rolesor model, a relatively entry-level point for Rolex, to US$63,500 for the platinum and US$88,300 for the 36mm Everose with 44 trapeze-cut diamonds and 10 diamonds as hour markers. Since I had some time with the wonderful wizards of Rolex, I asked them about how they work. The design team, under Davide 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 carmaker Alfa Romeo, where he worked in the design centre in Milan, in Italy. “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 has 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 does not 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 is 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 was not 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 is 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.” Our watches are tools. They indicate time Olivier Greim 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 have been playing with non-metal 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 to increase accuracy, 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 is 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 are 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 products? Airoldi says the company does listen to feedback – and it is fun to read internet commentary, even though it is often unkind. “But our decisions are not influenced by their will,” he says. “We need to be aware of the comments,” Greim adds. “[But] we’re not following the trends. We define trends.” Chris Rovzar

Behind the new Rolex Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller is 5 years of designing and engineering

Rolex has unveiled its Oyster Perpetual Land-Dweller, a watch years in the making, and revealed some of the steps a new design goes through