Adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.
In last week’s article, I wrote about the idea that while speed is good for many things, it’s not good for everything. Some purchases—a serious meal, a custom bag, a long-anticipated watch—deserve more time. The problem isn’t waiting; it’s when waiting is opaque and undignified. Rolex is the clearest example of this, not because their watches may require buyers to wait months or even years, but because those buyers wait with zero visibility into the process, and often find themselves jumping through hoops they think might shorten that wait. The Rolls-Royce Bespoke process suggests a better model, where there’s a wait, but that wait is explained and the buyer is kept informed along the way.
Buying a car versus buying a watch
The Rolls-Royce Bespoke process is dignified, with no begging, pleading, or storytelling; transparent, with the buyer aware of why their vehicle’s production is scheduled as it is; and global, with one list—no hopping from dealer to dealer.
Rolls-Royce Phantom. Image: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
I don’t mean to say that buying a watch is exactly like buying a car, or that it should be. A quick look at the Phantom configurator shows the following exterior options:
Exterior Colour: 66 options
Contrast Colour: 58 options
Bonnet: 6 options
Coachline: 130 options
Wheels: 8 options
Painted Brake Calipers: 4 options
Wheel Centres: 4 options
Pinstripe Applied to Wheel Centres: 43 options
Spirit of Ecstasy: 6 options
Dark Chrome Front Grille: 2 options
Chrome Plated Visible Exhausts: 2 options
Enhanced Exterior Black Detailing: 2 options
66 × 58 × 6 × 130 × 8 × 4 × 4 × 43 × 6 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 788,835,041,280. A Rolls-Royce Phantom has approximately 789 billion possible exterior configurations, before selecting interior options. This is just from their standard catalog, by the way; you can actually select from approximately 44,000 colors, or they’ll match any custom color, and even restrict it to you, so really, there are infinite combinations.
While Rolex doesn’t publish a number of current references, independent observers estimate they offer a few hundred distinct models. In other words, only accounting for the exterior of the car, and only selecting from Rolls-Royce’s standard catalog, they offer billions of times the number of configurations as does Rolex. I can imagine a world in which Rolex offers many more possible configurations than they do today, but we don’t need to go down that road.
Rolex and the logic of Bespoke
What would it take for Rolex to adopt a Rolls-Royce-like model? They would have to make a set of changes to their business—but no one of the changes seems insurmountable:
