Built to Be Bought

The watches you've heard of are not the watches the world bought.
For every Submariner on a James Bond wrist, there are a hundred million Casio F-91Ws on the wrists of teenagers, soldiers, and accountants. For every Patek Philippe Nautilus on a waiting list, there are five hundred Apple Watches sold this quarter. The twentieth century's most successful object is not the car or the smartphone. It is the wristwatch - and the wristwatch the magazines never wrote about.
Built to Be Bought tells the real story of the wrist in twenty watches, chosen on one criterion: volume. Not prestige. Not pedigree. What people actually paid for.
Inside, you'll find:

• The bathroom-window drop test that gave us the G-Shock.
• The Friday-before-Basel deadline that nearly killed the Royal Oak.
• The Hayek son who overrode his own marketing department to launch the MoonSwatch - and produced the largest single watch hit of the 2020s.
• The spreadsheet at an authorised dealer in 2019 with eighty-plus names against a single Tudor reference.
• Why the F-91W appears on terror watch lists, prison commissaries, and the wrist of the President of Iran.
• How a Cupertino wearable shipped more units in one year than the entire Swiss watch industry combined.