Swiss Cricket
It’s just not French
Motorsport, sailing, football, golf, tennis, rugby and the Olympics all draw in enthusiastic sponsorship support from watch brands. They ‘get’ the sports and understand the demographics, so any marketing executive looking to suggest a deal with an F1 team or an up-and-coming tennis player will know they’ll get a hearing. The one glaring omission, at least in terms of audience numbers, is cricket, a sport that leaves the mostly French and Swiss decision makers in the watch industry absolutely stumped despite being one of the highest value sports on the planet (India’s domestic IPL competition managed to sell global tv rights for even more than the English Premier League), so well played Rado for stepping up to sponsor the England men’s team.
It was a local market move according to Matthias Breschan, Rado’s CEO and the numbers certainly stack up with a domestic audience of some 17.8m watching the five matches of the recent Ashes series against Australia for an average of nearly ten hours each, while 655,000 went through the turnstiles, a valuable demographic that has also caught Oris’ eye (the brand is sponsor of Lord’s ground). All very pleasing and straight forward but there’s also a little bit of history involved too: Rado’s DiaStar, launched in 1962, was a smash hit in cricket’s biggest market, India (and across the rest of south and east Asia), thanks to then unique proposition of cases made from gold-plated tungsten carbide – gold watches that were utterly scratch-proof and relatively affordable found buyers in their droves.
I’m not going to argue that the DiaStar is more important than the Nautilus or a more significant design than the Carrera but it deserves a little appreciation of its own - a brief glance at its predecessor is enough to see what a step-change the DiaStar represented.
As is so typical of the industry, the innovation behind the tungsten carbide cases was a mixture of chance and appetite. Rado had only existed as brand name for a few years – Schlup & Co made ‘white-label’ watches and realised the family name wasn’t going to work as a brand and in truly 1950s style came up with the word ‘Rado’, which means wheel in Esperanto and with the new brand in place, they were actively looking for new ideas. Step forward a product manager called Marc Lederrey who, after visiting a case maker, wondered why no one had thought of making watches out of the materials such as tungsten carbide used to cut, drill and polish those cases. He quickly became obsessed and Rado had it’s big idea..
Over the months that followed, Rado developed a way to work with the significantly higher temperatures and pressures tungsten carbide involved, even using industrial diamond powder to polish the bezel. That process encouraged the designers to emphasise the bezel, which in turn leant itself to the simple, blocky aesthetic of the dial. The result was something utterly new and distinctive and so the DiaStar was born.
Far less celebrated than the Carrera and Cosmograph, the DiaStar didn’t change the terms of watch design in the way that the Heuer and Rolex chronographs did, but the design was certainly influential and, arguably, more so than the chronographs in the short term – look at the Heuer Montreal, Breitling Datora and Omega Dynamic from the early 1970s.
The success of the DiaStar, in turn, encouraged Rado to carve a niche for itself as a materials innovator and as a pusher of design boundaries which eventually saw the brand debut ceramic in 1986 and work with and intriguing array of external designers including Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic and Alfredo Häberli (who designed the recent anniversary DiaStar) all the while maintaining a certain aloofness as a brand that stops it being pigeon-holed too easily.
