The birth of Tudor dates back to 1946 when Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex, officially launched the company Montres Tudor SA. The name itself goes back to 1926, however, the year it was registered by the Swiss watch company, “Veuve de Philippe Hüther,” on behalf of Hans Wilsdorf. A decade later, in 1936, Wilsdorf took it over for himself.
In March 1946, the company really began to expand, and Hans Wilsdorf’s announcement at that time demonstrated his reasoning, “For some years now, I have been considering the idea of making a watch that our agents could sell at a more modest price than our Rolex watches, and yet one that would attain the standards of dependability for which Rolex
is famous.”
Hans Wildorf, who had already entered watchmaking history with the Oyster and the Perpetual, thus foreshadowed the commercial strategies that would be put into place by so many groups and brands only decades later.
At that time, Rolex was already famous around the world for the quality and prestige of its production. With Tudor, the pioneering Hans Wilsdorf wanted to reach a larger audience with a quality product guaranteed by the ‘parent company’. With it, he wanted to offer advanced technology and functionality, good design, a distribution network around the world, and good after-sales service.
The evolution of the Tudor logo over the last few decades perfectly illustrates the brand’s journey. From the beginning, in the 1920s and 1930s, only the name Tudor appeared on the logo, the name of the famous dynasty that long reigned in England. Around 1936, the logo took on the emblematic rose of the Tudors shown on a shield. This was a way to symbolize the two poles of the brand—the style and elegance of the rose, combined with the strength and the ‘technical nature’ of the shield.
Starting in 1947, one year after the launch of Montres Tudor SA, only the rose appeared on the dials, thus showing, above all, the brand’s elegant style. Finally, in 1969, the brand came out with a number of technical pieces and the rose disappeared in favour of only the shield, emphasizing the notions of resistance and reliability. Today, this same shield has been stylized and given its letters of nobility, resembling more a coat of arms, as it decorates the dial of the new Tudor watches.
“Punished without mercy”
No sooner said than done—the following year, in 1947, Tudor launched the Tudor Oyster. In 1952, it was followed by the Tudor Oyster Prince line. As the ‘Oyster’ name indicates, the first Tudor timepieces offered major technical advances, and the brand emphasized its close relationship with Rolex in its advertisements that featured the mention “Sponsored by Rolex”, under the Tudor logo.
But the focus of the brand’s communication distinguished itself by its clearly designated ‘target’. Its advertisements showed situations such as workers perched on a beam high atop a skyscraper, a motorcyclist on a small mountain road, or (rather surprising in today’s sensibilities) the image of a worker using a pneumatic drill. These images were accompanied by the slogan, “Punished without mercy! – Triumph of the new self-winding watch." Solidity, reliability and precision were thus strongly emphasized.
Tudor thus created a special place for itself in the symphony of brands and, over the years, would emphasize its identity and its particular style with a mix of technology and modernity combined in an elegant design. In 1952, after the participation of 30 Tudor Oyster Prince watches in a scientific expedition to North Greenland organized by the Royal Navy, the brand decided to expand the functional technology of its watches, notably by developing a professional diver’s watch, the Tudor Prince Submariner, that would be adopted by the American Navy between 1962 and 1964 and by the French Navy at the beginning of the 1970s (until 1984). Following this, came other remarkable models such as the Tudor Prince Date-Day and the particularly emblematic Tudor Oysterdate Chronograph that was introduced in 1970.
The following decades were marked by the overwhelming quartz revolution and crisis as well as an explosion in the number of new brands coming from all over. While Tudor presented some very interesting models, such as the Hydronaut in 1999, the brand began to see its singularity wane little by little. Yet during this period, Tudor still remained quite strong in certain markets—markets that were ignored by other brands, such as the immense Chinese mainland (its early presence in China has allowed it today to benefit from more than 300 points of sale and 25 same-name boutiques in this country alone) and its image also endured in many other of the world’s regions.
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