In the early Eighties, the Swiss watch industry experienced an existential crisis. The mechanical watches that Swiss makers had spent centuries perfecting were suddenly outclassed. Cheaper, more reliable and far more accurate quartz models, developed by Japanese firms like Seiko and Casio, had arrived.
Instead of gears and springs, these watches used a battery-powered circuit to count the electrical pulses generated by a vibrating sliver of crystal. The result was astonishing accuracy, an order of magnitude greater than the finest mechanical timepieces. And because they didn’t require the same painstaking craftsmanship, quartz watches could be mass produced cheaply.
Almost overnight, the Swiss product became obsolete. By 1980, Japan had overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest watch producer. More than half of Swiss watch companies collapsed. Two thirds of all watchmaking jobs disappeared. For many, the industry was due its last rites.
But the truth, as any trip on a Geneva airport travelator will impress upon you, is that the Swiss watch industry today is thriving. And at the heart of this success sits one company in particular: Rolex — the undisputed king of the global luxury watch market. Last year it likely sold nearly double that of its nearest competitor, Cartier, booking revenues larger than its next four rivals combined.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Rolex’s dominance came as a result of the decisions it made during the industry’s Eighties inflection point: recognising the shift before anyone else, making the boldest moves, and, in doing so, leading the charge.
You’d be wrong. They did the opposite. They stuck with their core line of mechanical models. Repositioned their pricing only gradually. And bar launching a single new line, they left quartz alone. Rolex stopped, stayed still, and let the world come back around. It worked. By 1989, sales were back to record levels, and the company was well on its way to the unassailable position they hold today.
This is not usually how we tell success stories. We prefer tales of bold moves and dramatic reinvention: the visionary founder, the company that turned on a dime. But sometimes fortune doesn’t favour the bold. Sometimes it favours the boring.
In the luxury market, above all others, this is the strategy that most often leads to success. Hermés’s best-selling product, the Birkin bag, remains unchanged since its debut in 1984. Loro Piana’s clothing line avoids logos at all costs. And even the most radical of the luxury conglomerates — LVMH and Kering — retain corporate structures that put families, not investors, in the driving seat. In this world, slow and steady is not merely a virtue. It’s the whole business model.
The feeling of existential crisis that gripped the artisans of Switzerland in the Eighties will be familiar to anyone who has turned on TV news recently. The shock of the tariffs, and their subsequent 90-day pause, however, provide us with an important lesson ripped straight from the world of luxury: that sometimes the best strategy is to wait.
That’s a hard thing to say out loud. For the past few years, the mood music in our country has been to speed things up, not slow them down. When it comes to solving Britain’s problems we rightly aspire to West Coast velocity, not the glacial pace of a luxury goods company. You don’t need to invoke the Lower Thames Crossing paperwork, or the geological timelines of the UK’s Small Modular Reactor programme, to know that wait-and-see government usually ends in disappointment. Slowness, domestically, at least, is a luxury we can — and should — do without.
But when it comes to how we position ourselves as a country in the midst of a global trade war, ballast might just matter more than bravado. Trade between the world’s two largest economies remains essentially frozen, and the negotiations ahead promise to be just as chaotic as the week that triggered them. The unexpected pause is just the President’s latest in a long line of mercurial moments.
When another, in time, arrives, we’ll soon hear another wave of frantic calls for Britain, unprepared and overexposed, to take quick, reactive measures. But in moments when boldness feels like the most obvious response, Britain’s smartest move will likely continue to mirror Rolex and hold still. Call it what it is: luxury geopolitics.
If we want to adopt that posture — less startup nation, more storied brand — what would that look like in practice? Well, great luxury companies generally rely on three things.
The first is a heritage and a story: a long, slow accumulation of trust. Rolex’s brand strength in the quartz crisis wasn’t just aesthetic, it was psychological. People had come to believe, almost irrationally, in the quiet, steady competence of its product. Think of the Submariner (most famously worn by Sean Connery in Goldfinger), a diving watch sold on the promise that it would never fail you at the exact moment you really, really need to know the time.
In a volatile world, where the US has turned from a beacon of stability to an agent of unpredictability, restraint becomes rarer and more valuable. That’s why calls to retaliate quickly with tariffs of our own, coordinate a fast response with the EU, or convene yet another emergency summit, all fell wide of the mark. The more others shift the rules, the more valuable it becomes to be the one player who doesn’t.
“The more others shift the rules, the more valuable it becomes to be the one player who doesn’t.
And if we really do want to go full luxury geopolitics, then Britain is unusually well suited to the part. A coronation, a visit to Balmoral, a raised eyebrow from the King — these aren’t just ceremonial flourishes. They’re signals. Like Rolex, Britain still carries a brand. And in the one capital that matters most right now, that brand still means something. That’s leverage, and we’d be foolish to squander it.
The second is product. A luxury brand is only as strong as the thing it sells. Packaging matters, yes: but only if what’s inside holds up. Rolex works because the watches do. This, I think, is where Britain is most vulnerable. The story still plays, but the substance is lagging behind.
Which is why the luxury should stop at the front door. Brand abroad, yes. But at home, it’s time to get serious. That means making the product better: faster planning, cheaper energy, lighter regulation. You can’t sell craftsmanship if your tools are blunt.
The good news, if there is any, is that we’re arguably less exposed than others. Our exports to the US tend to be highly-differentiated and hard to substitute. Less soybeans and steel bolts, more jet engines, Range Rovers, and precision instruments.
A 10% tariff is still painful, of course — but in our case, it’s easier to manage. The relative concentration of our goods sector, where a few large companies often dominate, means the government has clearer levers to pull: from production shifts to policy tweaks or negotiating carve-outs.
There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit. Take our most obviously vulnerable sector — car manufacturing — which even now remains hampered not only by foreign competition, but by domestic regulation. This is something the Prime Minister seemed to signal earlier this week at Jaguar Land Rover. “We’ve got your back,” he declared, while announcing only the mildest of changes to the zero emission vehicle mandate in response.
It’s easy to wince at such a gap between rhetoric and reality. But it also means there’s still plenty of headroom left to respond, if required. The current government is not exactly averse to using a crisis to railroad through reforms they’d never be able to do otherwise. This is an impulse to reward, not to punish.
The third is independence: something particularly integral to Rolex’s survival during the quartz crisis. One of the core reasons why it was able to maintain its defensive crouch, whilst its great rival of the time, Omega, floundered, was that Rolex wasn’t entangled in either of the two Swiss conglomerates that dominated the industry at the time. Instead it is, and remains, owned by a family-governed charitable foundation.
The result was that it wasn’t tied to external timelines, or forced into reactive decisions to continue making the numbers go up and to the right. Omega, in a panic, ended up finding its offering expanding to around 1,000 different models. Rolex waited, watched its rivals stumble, and acted only when it was ready.
Perhaps it’s not so bad, then, if Britain is more Rolex-shaped than policymakers would like. We’re slow. We’re cautious. We’re surrounded by larger blocs. But we’re also, crucially, not beholden to any of them. What until now has looked like drift might end up feeling more like optionality. We’re not anyone’s favourite. But we’re no one’s least favourite either (bar, perhaps, Russia). In a trade war, that’s not a bad place to be.
Indeed, luxury geopolitics alone won’t save us. But strategic patience might. Already things have swung wildly each day. Relief one moment, paroxysms the next. Our tariff margin against the rest of the world widens and narrows with the stroke of a single Truth Social post. The more things change, the more valuable it is to be the most stable player in the game.
This isn’t to say our current moment is one to press home a competitive advantage. Like the Swiss watchmakers of the Eighties, our challenge is not to ride out the storm unscathed — or even strengthened. It’s simply to emerge with something intact.
The crisis Rolex managed to weather wasn’t just about watches. It was about continuity, about what endures and why. It’s easy to look at the tariff drama and imagine the affair neatly concluded: sides chosen, outcomes settled.
More likely, we’ll come to see this as just the beginning, not of a trade spat, but of something far more profound. A moment existential, not just for industries, but for an entire world order. And in that world, Britain’s institutions have weathered more and lasted longer. We like to think that action always wins. But sometimes, doing nothing is the most strategic move of all.
In Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond finds himself trapped in an Alpine hideout. To escape, he must get past a hulking bodyguard. Fortunately, Bond has a secret weapon: a “heavy Rolex Oyster Perpetual” strapped to his wrist. He slides the watch onto his fist, turning it into, in Fleming’s words, “the most effective knuckle-duster”. Bond bides his time, lands a swift Rolex to the jaw, and makes his escape.
Reinvention is overrated. In geopolitics, as in luxury, there’s power in restraint. Sometimes all you need is patience, presence — and a heavy Rolex Oyster Perpetual to hand when it counts.
