Who Are the Rolex Testimonees?
Rolex doesn't call them ambassadors. Testimonees are athletes, explorers, scientists and artists the brand has backed since the 1920s. Here's how it works.
2 min read
A Testimonee is what Rolex calls the people other brands would call ambassadors: athletes, explorers, scientists, musicians and artists the company backs and associates itself with. The word is deliberate. Rolex isn't paying them to hold up a watch, it's claiming their achievements as evidence for its own.
What does Rolex mean by a Testimonee?
The distinction sits in the word itself. A testimonee gives testimony.
Rolex chooses people whose record already demonstrates the qualities the brand wants attached to its name: endurance, precision, doing difficult things properly over a long career. Those people wear the watches and appear in the campaigns, but the argument being made is that the watch belongs in that company, not that the person likes the watch. It's a subtle piece of marketing and an effective one, because it lets Rolex talk about deep-sea exploration and Everest and Grand Slams without ever quite saying anything about a wristwatch. The programme goes back to the 1920s, when Mercedes Gleitze swam the English Channel wearing an Oyster, and Rolex has been running the same play for a century since.
Who are some of the Rolex Testimonees?
They come from a wider range of fields than most people expect. Sport is simply the most visible slice.
- Sport. Golfers like Jordan Spieth and Lydia Ko, and going further back the Olympic downhill champion Jean-Claude Killy.
- Exploration. The oceanographer Sylvia Earle, whose Mission Blue campaign works to protect marine habitats, and Tenzing Norgay of the 1953 Everest expedition.
- Arts and sciences. Musicians, conductors, architects and researchers, the part of the roster almost nobody can name and Rolex quietly invests the most in.
One point worth getting right, since it's repeated incorrectly all over the internet, including in the earlier version of this post. Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the Everest summit together on 29 May 1953. For years neither would say who set foot on it first, out of respect for the other and for what they'd done as a rope team. Long after Tenzing's death, Hillary confirmed that he had stepped up first. Tenzing was not the first man on the summit. He was one of the first two, which is the accurate and frankly more interesting version.
Why does the programme matter to a collector?
Because it's most of the reason these watches carry the associations they do.
A Submariner is a competent dive watch. So were a dozen others. What a Submariner has that they don't is seventy years of Rolex placing the brand alongside people doing serious things in difficult places, and that accumulated meaning is a real part of what you're buying and what the watch holds its value on. You don't have to admire the marketing to recognise it worked.
One of the pleasures of a brand like Rolex is that there's a century of this to go through. If you're looking for a pre-owned Rolex in San Diego, I hope you'll give me a call or drop by my La Jolla showroom.
