How prestige brands stay ahead

The style cannot arrive before the evidence

In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh took the Trieste submarine to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, an experimental Rolex Deep Sea Special strapped to the outside. Trieste descended 10,916 meters (nearly 36,000 feet) and the watch came back working. Piccard sent Rolex a message. The watch, he said, “works as well at 11,000 meters as it does on the surface.”

Rolex had climbed the most challenging mountains too. The 1953 Everest expedition team wore Oyster Perpetual watches at the highest point on earth. These are ridiculous capabilities for an ordinary customer. Nobody wearing a Rolex to dinner in Geneva needs to explore oceans or scale the Himalayas. But the thought lingers in the owner’s mind. 

The company also built watches for racing drivers. The Cosmograph Daytona became synonymous with motor racing and worked its way onto the big screen when actor and race car driver Paul Newman first wore it in James Goldstone’s film Winning. Newman continued wearing it throughout his racing career.

That is how watches entered popular culture. Rolex ran its engineering tests in public, let explorers supply the drama, and went on to establish Rolex as a symbol of reliability: something that works even in the most challenging conditions. 

On, the Swiss running company, has followed a similar playbook. Olivier Bernhard, a retired triathlete, wanted a shoe that landed differently, so he glued pieces of garden hose to the bottom of a pair of shoes. The prototype won an industry award in 2010. The runner’s need to improve performance came first. Then, to Bernhard’s irritation, people started wearing On shoes with jeans. Co-founder Caspar Coppetti remembers thinking, “It’s like buying a Porsche and going shopping.” The extreme performance of On running shoes had entered the public consciousness: what was once meant for cutting-edge athletes was being adopted by couch potatoes.

Roger Federer joined On in 2019, not as a spokesperson but as what On calls a co-entrepreneur, taking an equity stake to work on a tennis shoe. The glamour arrived attached to a technical project. Last year, On passed CHF 3bn ($3.75bn). 

First comes the performance, then the proof in front of witnesses. Then comes glamour, lifestyle, and memory – only at the very end does a cultural phenomenon emerge. 

The Petersen houses another car that shows what happens when a company tries to run this playbook backward, style before proof: the 1954 Chevrolet Corvette. It looks fast. Low fiberglass body, whitewall tires, chrome teeth in the grille. But its measly 150-horsepower six-cylinder engine and two-speed automatic failed to meet buyer expectations. Sales dragged until Chevrolet put in a V8 and restyled the car. Only then did it become the Corvette Americans remember. Style cannot arrive before the evidence of performance. And that is what a brand is in the end: performance remembered.