Last week, James Stacey and I found ourselves in London to co-host an event with our parent company, Watches of Switzerland. Since it had been years since either of us had been across the pond, the folks in the UK offered to take us through the new, gargantuan Bond Street boutique (owned by WoS), and we happily obliged. Now, I’ll speak for both James and me when I say that we were expecting to be wowed by crazy off-catalog gemset pieces, or the vintage pieces in the Rolex CPO section (hello, Comex Sub). But, when we first entered the boutique, one of the glass vitrines at the reception desk held something completely bizarre that neither of us could take our eyes off of—a gleaming desk clock, in the design of the perfect fake Rolex Submariner watches.
What the hell?
As it turns out, a few months ago, AAA Rolex replica watches quietly released the new Submariner Desk Clock ref. 909010LN. After a weekend in London and a full flight back home, I’m still not over seeing this thing in the metal. Even in this era of Rolex, where cufflinks and small accessories are for sale, a desk clock is entirely different, and very few brands have gone past making a modern desk or wall clock that isn’t a facade of a familiar design mounted onto a very obviously flimsy time-only quartz movement.
The buy copy Rolex Submariner Desk Clock watches is set in a hemispherical case, not in Rolex’s typical 904L stainless steel but rather in the more conventional 316L used by the industry. It sits freely on a little circular pedestal, with the curved “caseback” intended to allow the owner to position the clock at any angle preferred. No crown, no screwed in caseback, just a chamfered seam that gives away the exterior case’s two-part construction.
The front of the clock is one of the most recognizable designs in the world, but this time in an exaggerated diameter of 80mm (no lug-to-lug applicable). Like all modern Submariners, applied indices surround the glossy black lacquer dial. Although the indices are scaled up considerably for the clock format, they remain filled with Rolex’s own proprietary Chromalight luminescent material. The logos, Swiss Made text, and minutes track are all printed in white onto the dial, though notably a few pieces of text typically found on the cheap replica watches are missing: the “Oyster Perpetual Date” line, the 1000ft/300m depth rating, and “Superlative Chronometer Officially Certified,” as this clock is none of these.
A few other details remain faithful to the 1:1 clone watches. The rehaut is engraved with that distinctly modern repeating “ROLEX” motif, with the serial number engraved in the pattern right at 6 o’clock. Surrounding it is the largest ceramic bezel I’ve ever seen, in Rolex’s black Cerachrom with all the standard bezel markings and lumed pip at 12 o’clock. Bizarrely, the bezel is fixed, thus purely supporting the Submariner aesthetic. The handset, with the iconic Mercedes hand, remains, as the seconds hand sweeps faster than a typical quartz movement but stutters enough to give away that a mechanical movement isn’t underneath. Last but certainly not least is the date window and its cyclops. I was a bit confused when I first saw it. Why not use the no-date Submariner for the clock design? Why introduce an element that you’d have to manually correct for, on a clock? And where is the crown?
To actually open up this thing, you gently twist the front of the clock from that rounded base, and once you feel the twist hitting its limit, you pull outwards from that base. I suppose, in a very Rolex way, this was an immensely satisfying experience thanks to the very smooth resistance I felt when separating the two parts, provided by three spring-loaded ball bearings guided in three milled-out channels. You can see in the photo that the bearings travel through the channel until a final indentation is milled to “lock” the clock into the base, preventing it from rotating further. I can tell you that this is certainly the densest and most substantial modern desk clock I’ve ever gotten my hands on.
But when I finally cracked open the clock and saw the caliber, the date window finally made sense. Inside the high quality copy Rolex Submariner Desk Clock watches is the new analog-digital quartz Rolex Caliber 8335, which, as proudly engraved on the broadly striped and chamfered “caseback,” is a secular calendar movement. And right there, on the bottom left of the caseback, sat a crown with a particularly tall crown tube. Pull out the crown, and in an experience I’ve never said about any Rolex in my life, the LCD at the top comes to life. There is only one line of information belonging to the display—the current date, month, and year (in European format). When setting the time past midnight, you could feel (and hear) the date window on the face of the watch jumping forward with a light click. At the same time, the LCD on the back updates to reflect the next day.
The secular calendar complication reflects a step up from a perpetual calendar. While a conventional perpetual calendar accounts for leap years, it still requires a manual correction every 100 years due to the Gregorian calendar. The secular calendar, on the other hand, accounts for that 100-year cycle through the year 2400, meaning that, aside from a battery change, this clock would keep the date on the front accurate every month for the next 400 years or so. And yes, if you wind the time past midnight in reverse, the date window rolls back gradually to reflect the previous day.
So here we have it, the best-selling fake Rolex Submariner Desk Clock watches. It’s been a few days since I’ve seen it, and it still feels absolutely surreal to me. If I were first introduced to this clock outside a Rolex boutique, there’s no chance I would have ever said it was real. But, sitting front and center in the London boutique, it very much was. Oh, I haven’t mentioned the price—it’s $10,270. Yes, this thing is basically as expensive as a proper Submariner. That is nuts. And yes, we were told that this clock has a proper waitlist at the Bond Street store.
Though I now have more questions than ever about this clock, the big questions that linger are: why the Swiss movement clone Rolex Submariner watches, and why develop a Secular Calendar clock of all things? I suppose it would be easy to just dismiss both curiosities by saying it’s just Rolex being Rolex, but I actually think these two elements of this new clock kind of contradict each other. On one hand, making an analog-digital secular quartz mechanism just to make the date window of a Submariner accurate on a clock without monthly adjustment does seem like an incredibly Rolex sort of move.
But, on the other hand, choosing the iconic dive watch as the design basis, without having its associated water resistance or functioning unidirectional dive bezel, does stand out as purely form over function for a design straight out of the Professional lineup. I would have thought the brand would have designed a desk clock around one of the more elegant silhouettes to feel more at home — can you imagine a secular calendar Day-Date, or a time-only 1908?
As the AAA+ replica Rolex watches first execution of such an intense take on a desk clock, I’d very safely assume we might see more variations down the line. I’m just praying we’ll get to see the Sky-Dweller and its annual calendar GMT dial display get its time in the spotlight.
