rolex inside rolex

INSIDEROLEX

The very private Swiss watch giant opens the

doors of its new Geneva facility.

BY NORMA BUCHANAN

Rolex’s new facility at Plan-les-Ouates

INSIDE ROLEX

104 WatchTime August 2006

them and see real Rolex employees makingreal Rolex watches, we didn’t think twice.

In early April, WatchTime and about 50U.S. retailers gathered for a daylong tourthat would take in the company’s threeGeneva factories. They make all the com-pany’s cases, bracelets and dials and assem-ble its finished watches. (Alas, we will notsee Rolex’s only other factory, in Bienne,where it makes its movements. Maybe an-other time, we’re told.)

Rolex’s Geneva facilities are in the finalstages of a massive, eight-year-long con-struction and renovation project. Its aim is

to bring together the many manufacturingoperations, some 19 in all, that were oncespread out in and around Geneva. In thelate 1990s, when a wave of consolidationswept over the watch industry, Rolex beganto buy up many of its suppliers in order togain greater control of them, creating whatthe company refers to as “the RolexGroup.” As Patrick Heiniger, managing di-rector and CEO, explains in a brochureabout the Geneva facilities, “At the start ofthe 21st century, we made a strategic deci-sion to ensure our autonomy and maintaincontrol over the essential components of

R olex has always had a Garbo-likesense of privacy. With no verygood reason to court the media,

or even allow them through its doors, itchugs happily along, selling its roughlythree-quarters of a million watches a year,which bring in some 2 billion Swiss francs(this is an estimate; the company, needless tosay, does not reveal sales figures.) As theworld’s biggest luxury watch brand, with asterling image that never fades, Rolex needspublicity like Garbo needed more fans.

So recently, when Rolex invited us to visitits facilities in Geneva, to actually go inside

Rolex makes its dials at it facility in Chêne-Bourg. Here a crown goes on

the dial of an Oyster Perpetual Day-Date

Rolex’s building at Plan-les-Ouates is huge, the size of five football fields, jet black and forbidding. “The black glass facades conceal a surprising world,” Rolex says.

INSIDE ROLEX


our watches. We integrated our Swiss sup-pliers into the Group, and consolidated ourGeneva activities at three new sites in build-ings that exemplify state-of-the-art technol-ogy.” These suppliers included the braceletmaker Gay Frères, the case maker Genex,the dial manufacturer Beyeler and the wind-ing-crown producer Boninchi. Havingbrought all of them under the Rolex banner,the company wanted to bring them underthe same roof, or rather, three roofs.

The consolidation is the latest chapter inRolex’s long history in Geneva. The com-pany has been an institution there for near-ly a century, almost as much a part of the

city’s identity as the famous jet d’eau at themouth of the Rhône or the lovely water-front skyline. Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorfmoved Rolex to Geneva in 1919 (the com-pany was born in 1905 in London), and itremained in the city center for more than 40years. In 1965, Rolex completed construc-tion of new headquarters in an industrialsection of Geneva called Acacias, south-west of the city center. Its move there brokewith Geneva watchmaking tradition, whichheld that companies be located on thebanks of Lake Geneva.

Now, with just a year or so to go until thelast glistening green glass panel is hoisted

into position on the refurbished head-quarters, Rolex, in an uncharacteristic burstof openness, wants to show off its deluxenew digs.

Life upon the shelves

We start at the spanking new building inPlan-les-Ouates (pronounced “plan layWHAT”), which was completed last Octo-ber. This district, on the outskirts of Geneva,has recently become a luxury-watch strong-hold. Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin,Piaget, and Frédérique Constant have allbuilt new production facilities there, turn-

Rolex’s gem-setting and dial-manufacturing facility at Chêne-Bourg

At Plan-les-Ouates, the average wait for components once they have been ordered from a workstation by means of a click of a mouse is eight minutes.

INSIDE ROLEX


ing the flat, featureless expanse into ashowcase of eye-catching, ultra-modern in-dustrial architecture. Rolex’s building is themost imposing of all; it is huge (it coversnearly 26,000 square meters of space,roughly the size of five football fields), jet-black, and forbidding.

Inside, we see a short movie presentingfacts and figures about the new building.It’s 11 stories high, we’re told, with five ofthem underground, and composed of threeparallel, rectangular units, connected by acentral corridor. It has 157,000 square me-ters of floor space and houses 1,700 ma-chines. Deliveries are made via a 10-meter-wide covered road that runs through thebuilding. The roof is covered with gardensand is used as a relaxation area by the 1,500people who work in the facility.

The glass that completely covers thebuilding shields the work within from pry-ing eyes. Those lucky enough to penetratethat armor are in for a treat, the film’s nar-rator suggests. “The black glass facadesconceal a surprising world,” he says.

He’s right, as we discover from the very

first stop on the tour. It’s the componentsstorage room (the prosaic name doesn’t doit justice, as we soon find out), on the sec-ond underground floor. To get there, wepass through an ultra-secure entrywayequipped with a retina-scanning system,meant to foil thieves with designs on thetreasure within.

We stand on a walkway, behind a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass, and look upwardand downward at layer upon layer of stor-age shelves: four stories’ worth of them,holding 30,000 separate compartments.(There are an additional 30,000 compart-ments in a second storage room, a precau-tion in case disaster strikes the first one.) Thevast expanse of shelves is itself impressive,but the real spectacle is the computer-di-rected conveyors that pick up the compo-nents from the bins and deliver them towork stations throughout the building.There are countless of these automated go-fers zipping along aluminum rails, stopping,snatching the parts from the compartments,and zipping away again. Four kilometers ofthese rails snake through the facility; the

system extends tothe building’s far-thest reaches. Theaverage wait forcomponents, oncethey’ve been or-dered from a work-station by means ofa few mouse clicks,is eight minutes.

We gaze forquite a while,transfixed by thespeeding convey-ors, whose loud,constant whirringmakes it difficult tohear anything be-low a shout. Welaugh like kids in afunhouse whenonce in a while aconveyor comeszooming toward

Attaching a chronometer seal to a gold bracelet. Rolex not only makes itsown cases and bracelets at Plan-les-Ouates, it alloys its own gold there.

August 2006 WatchTime 109

us as if to crash through the glass pane,then stops short at its destination a few feetfrom our faces.

The Rolex production manager leading thetour tells us the system is working above Ro-lex’s initial expectations, and is 98% reliable.Then he herds us away, which, given our fasci-nated dilly-dallying, is like herding cats.

Gold standards

Where do these components – cases, braceletlinks, tiny bracelet fixings, clasps, and myriadother bits – come from? To find out, we take theelevator up to the ground floor. We’re on ourway to the foundry to see, as the movie de-scribes it, “the first step in the creation of aRolex.” The company mixes its own gold,enabling it to both create its own alloys, like aspecial blend of pink gold it recently developed(the alloy doesn’t lose its pink tint, the way someother pink-gold alloys eventually do, Rolex says),and to control the gold’s quality. Rolex is thebiggest user of gold in Switzerland and the onlywatch company that does its own alloying.

We see the end product in a so-called“gold pour,” in which half a gallon of fierymolten gold streams from a crucible into apan. After it cools, the metal is stampedinto cases or casebacks or drawn through aseries of dies to form gold wire of the rightshape to make the various Rolex bracelets:the Oyster, the President, etc. Because Rolexuses so much gold, it’s able to employ ma-chines normally used for steel or aluminum,which are larger than standard gold-pro-

cessing machines and hence more precise.It’s a good thing: we’re told that the toler-ance for bracelet-component parts is 2/100of a millimeter (each bracelet has about 200parts), and that’s why a Rolex bracelet willlast 30 to 40 years without needing repair.

Steel parts are made in the same depart-ment. Rolex uses an alloy known as 904L(it’s the only watch company to do so, itsays) that it buys from outside suppliers. Thesteel resists corrosion extremely well and isalso very tough, so that it’s durable, butquite difficult to machine.

After the parts are fabricated, they’repolished. A robot, enclosed in a glass cubi-cle, handles the initial polishing. We watchit (him? it’s wearing a baby-blue dust coverthat cloaks its oddly misshapen body), mes-merized by its jerky but somehow lifelikemovements, as it “holds” a watchcaseagainst a polishing machine. It’s nightmar-ish and funny at the same time, like thecreatures in the bar scene in “Star Wars.”The robot is a high-maintenance employee:we’re told it needs to be recalibrated afterevery 10 cases it polishes to keep it workingwith the required precision. But it clearlyearns its keep: “With a little help from therobots, you can make a very good product,”the Rolex manager cheerfully points out,glancing at his electronic colleague.

When the robot is finished, the case ispassed along to humans for fine polishing.Only real hands and eyes can detect tiny im-perfections that might remain on the case’ssurface, we’re told.

“At the start of the 21st century, wemade a strategic decision to ensureour autonomy and maintain controlover the essential components of ourwatches.”

Rolex CEO Patrick Heiniger

INSIDE ROLEX


Robo jock

Our next stop is the laboratory, where sci-entists, engineers and technicians (there are20-plus PhD’s employed there), work onquality control, research and developmentand general trouble-shooting, like fixing aglitch on the production line or diagnosingthe cause of a difficult-to-open braceletclasp. “You can see there are people at thecenter of Rolex, not machines,” the Rolex

manager tells us. Simple tasks have been re-assigned to robots, he explains, but peoplestill do the complicated ones.

These jobs include making sure the rawmaterials are sufficiently pure before they’remade into watch parts. This means examin-ing them with a scanning electron micro-scope. We’re told a story that illustrateshow stringent its standards are for raw ma-terials: When Rolex receives bars of steelfrom its supplier, the company performs dif-

ferent tests on them, including a polishingtest. One recent polishing test produced asmall scratch, what the technicians call a“comet,” on the surface of the bar. Examin-ing the steel under the electron microscope,the Rolex technicians found a minusculeparticle, 8 microns across (1/10 as wide as ahair) in front of the comet. They analyzed itand found that the particle was composedpartly of titanium. They phoned the steelsupplier, who told them that the furnace

Attaching the crown to the 50th anniversary edition of the Rolex GMT-Master II

When its technicians discovered a microscopic trace of titanium in a shipment of steel, Rolexreturned the entire shipment – 10 tons of steel – to the supplier.

INSIDE ROLEX


used to alloy the metal had earlier beenused to make titanium steel for anothercustomer. The furnace had not beencleaned thoroughly and some traces of tita-nium remained in it. Hearing this, Rolex re-jected the entire load, sending back 10 met-ric tons of steel.

A few minutes later, in the research and de-velopment section of the lab, we learn a newword (new to most of us, that is): tribology, thescience of wear and tear. We see another robot,this one dedicated to studying the effects of

wear on watch bracelets. The robot has a man-nequin-like wrist and hand and wears a Rolexwatch. It is performing a sequence of fancymoves with its humanoid hand: twisting it,thrusting it down, turning it sideways, lifting itup, then repeating the series again and again.The moves, odd as they seem, are modeled onreal life. “We put some sensors on a colleagueof mine while he was doing different kinds ofsports: running, tennis, golf, and everythingelse,” a research and development managertells us. “We examined the motions and tried to[duplicate] them with this robot.” The robot al-lows Rolex to simulate a year’s worth of wear injust one week, and hence discover in a jiffy theadvantages of one bracelet design over another.

Behind the bling

We wave good-bye to the robot, which isstill frantically gesticulating, and soon pileinto a bus headed for the Rolex factory inChêne-Bourg, a few miles to the east.There, human hands, steady, patient ones,prevail. The first building to be completedin the Rolex remodeling program, in 2000,this facility was once the Genex case facto-ry and is now used for setting gems andmaking dials.

First we see the gem-setting process. Inone room, little diamonds are arranged inneat piles, waiting to be placed on bezels,dials and bracelets. Here, their color ischecked to make sure it’s the requisite “riv-er” grade (the equivalent of D or E on theGemological Institute of America’s gradingscale, which is widely used in the UnitedStates). The diamonds, in round, trapeze, orbaguette shapes, are painstakingly set byhand with the aid of a microscope.

In the dial-making department, we seemore handwork: printing of the dials andthe addition of markers and numerals. Dialsare made of brass, gold or platinum. Coloris imparted to the dials by a variety of meth-

In the research and development section of the lab, we learna new word: tribology, the science of wear and tear.

Voilà: The finished product

August 2006 WatchTime 113

ods: galvanization, physical vapor deposi-tion, or painting. Mother-of-pearl and me-teorite dials are made by gluing a thin layerof the decorative material onto a brass sub-strate.

Putting it together

Another bus ride takes us into Geneva’s citylimits to the area called Acacias. We cometo our third and final stop, the climax of thetour, in some sense: Rolex worldwideheadquarters. This complex, in the finalstages of expansion and renovation (it’sscheduled to be finished this year), is wherethe top Rolex executives, including PatrickHeiniger, have their offices. Rolex-watchershave long regarded the building, covered inglass tinted in imperial Rolex green, as afortress only a little less impenetrable thanthe Pentagon.

The facility consists of two side-by-sidetowers housing offices and administrative de-partments and, next to them, four industrialbuildings. It is in these buildings that Rolexwatches are assembled, put through their lastquality-control tests, packaged and shippedto markets throughout the world.

Most of the assembly is done by hand atrows of immaculately clean workbencheswhere employees, most of them women,combine all the pieces made elsewhere(movements from Bienne, cases andbracelets from Plan-les-Ouates, dials fromChêne-Bourg) into the final product. Wewatch the women, agile-fingered and assteady of touch as micro-surgeons, liftingup tiny gold watch hands (all Rolex watcheshave gold hands) with an air pump, so theywon’t get scratched, and positioning themon the dial. At other workstations, employ-ees are casing the movements and, at stillothers, placing the winding crowns. One ofthe final steps is attaching the winding ro-tor, a task performed with an electric screw-driver programmed to tighten the screws toprecisely the right tension.

Throughout it all, the women constantlycheck and re-check their work. Does thedate jump at midnight, as it should? Are the

1919: Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf relo-cates the company from London toGeneva, at a site in the city centernear the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre.

1960:Needing more space, Rolex decides tobuild a new headquarters in the Aca-cias industrial area in Geneva, to thesouthwest of the city center.

1965: Rolex inaugurates the Acacias head-quarters, which consists of two eight-story towers.

1978 to 1995: Two additional buildings areadded at the Acacias site.

Late 1990s: Rolex begins a program of verti-cal integration, buying up such suppli-ers as the bracelet maker Gay Frèresand case maker Genex.

1998: Construction begins on the Chêne-Bourg site, where Rolex does its gemsetting and dial making. With its glis-tening black-glass façade, the build-ing will serve as a model for Rolex’sother Geneva factories.

2000: The Chêne-Bourg facility is completed.

2001: Construction begins on Rolex’sbracelet and case manufacturingplant in Plan-les-Ouates.

2002: The company begins the refurbishingof the Acacias headquarters, which in-cludes heightening the two towers bythree stories, covering them withgreen glass facades, and building twoadditional manufacturing buildings.

2005: The Plan-les-Ouates facility is com-pleted.

Fall 2006 (projected): The Acacias refurbish-ing is completed.

ROLEX IN GENEVA: A TIMELINE

Rolex´s Acacias headquarters in the 1980s

INSIDE ROLEX


hands precisely superimposed? Is the dialflawless? Does the rotor sound as it shouldwhen it turns, or might one screw be a tadtoo loose? If everything passes muster, theserial numbers of the case and movement,which are engraved by laser, are registered,and the case is closed up.

The watch is still not ready to meet theworld. First it must pass a few more tests.Now machines take over. First there’s awater-resistance test using air pressure (theriskier water-resistance test, using water,comes later). Then the watch will be wound

automatically, by means of its rotor, tomake sure the winding mechanismproduces enough energy to keep themovement running. The precision testscome next. They’re similar to thoseperformed by COSC. (The movements havealready been certified by that agency; thepurpose of these in-house tests is to makesure the movements still measure up aftercasing). The dial is photographed once,then again, 24 hours later, and the timingcompared to that of a reference clock regu-lated by an atomic clock. Then the watch’s

precision is measured in each of fourdifferent positions. Lastly, the watch is placedin a water tank and tested at a pressure level10% above what is guaranteed for that par-ticular model. The bracelets are attached,and the watches' guarantees are placed withtheir respective watches. The watches areboxed for shipping, and off they go.

And so do we. After a dinner atop one ofthe towers, hosted by Patrick Heiniger, weleave the headquarters, a bounce in ourstep. Why? Because we’ve done it, we’vegotten inside Rolex. ■

Attaching a rotor at the Acacias workshops

rolex inside rolex

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