Pierre-Yves Donzé’s The Making of a Status Symbol is the closest approximation we are likely ever to have to an authoritative business history of Rolex, the world’s most valuable luxury watch brand. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, which has owned Rolex since the death of its founder in 1960, has never opened the company’s archives to researchers. Donzé, a leading historian of the Swiss watch industry and luxury goods and a Swiss national, was denied access as were all others before him, Rolex, he observes, “has no interest in encouraging narratives that contradict” its carefully cultivated origin myth (p. vii) and prefers to present itself as timeless rather than historical (p. 1). In marked contrast to rivals that commission anniversary celebrations, sponsor exhibitions, and underwrite scholarly histories, Rolex behaves as though it has no past.

The absence of company records has not deterred a small library of nearly 200 Rolex titles, including two Harvard Business School case studies (2006; 2021). Yet, the firm’s actual business history has remained blurry. Donzé’s achievement is to bring it into sharper focus through meticulous work in surrogate sources: the archives of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry; British, American, and Swiss patent records; Swiss federal files on taxation, trade, and labor; the Rolex account files at J. Walter Thompson’s London office; and an impressive range of jewelry and watch-trade periodicals in five languages. The book’s appendices alone—listing every known director of the Bienne manufacturing company (1921–2005), the Geneva holding company (since 1920), and the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation—represent a much-needed contribution to the governance history of this famously opaque enterprise.

The first four chapters of the book situate Rolex’s origins within the ecosystem of “Swiss technical excellence” (as the first part of the book is titled). From the young Bavarian orphan Hans Wilsdorf’s arrival in La Chaux-de-Fonds around 1900 to the development of the waterproof Oyster and self-winding Perpetual models in the interwar decades, Donzé carefully disentangles legend from evidence. Patent records, for example, reveal the critical role of the movement supplier Hermann Aegler—a collaboration that company mythology has largely effaced. Absent internal correspondence or technical drawings, however, important questions about innovation processes and Wilsdorf’s own contribution remain unanswerable. So, too, does the extent of Wilsdorf’s suspected Nazi sympathies, which led British authorities to place him under surveillance during and after the Second World War (p. 95).

Closely guarding the Rolex archive then is not just a perverse exercise of power by a foundation charged with running the world’s most successful luxury watch business and disbursing its considerable profits to charitable enterprises. It is a business decision arising out of imperatives to protect the brand.

Donzé’s book does not hurt the brand. It does not fully explain it either. Part II examines Rolex’s postwar consolidation (1945–1960) through innovative product design and a sophisticated global advertising campaign that systematically associated the brand with the “exceptional.” Part III confronts the quartz revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, which threatened to render mechanical watches obsolete. Here, the analysis is less satisfying. While Donzé documents Rolex’s survival and eventual triumph, he offers only limited insight into the strategic and operational decisions that enabled the firm to strengthen rather than merely defend its market position during the industry’s deepest crisis.

The book’s center of gravity lies firmly before 1945, and so some readers will regret the relatively brief treatment of the postwar decades. Occasional repetition and minor chronological backtracking also interrupt the narrative flow. A deeper engagement with Rolex’s advertising—particularly the role of television and product placement—would have been welcome, as would a more sustained theoretical discussion of how and why wearing a Rolex came to confer status. Some of the quantitative data on patents, precision records, and pricing are presented but not fully interrogated.

These are minor shortcomings in what remains an important study. Donzé has written an indispensable work of scholarship under uniquely difficult evidentiary constraints. Should the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation ever decide to open Rolex’s archives, Pierre-Yves Donzé is the scholar best equipped to write the definitive history that would then become possible.