By Rodrigo Uchoa, special for Brazil Stock Guide
Design history is full of rivalries, but it also has stories of conviction. This is one of the latter. Gérald Genta and Kikuo Ibe never met, never competed for the same clients, and, at heart, never wanted the same thing. One believed that a piece of steel could carry as much meaning as a jewel; the other believed a watch should be so reliable and durable that you could let a car run over it without fear of losing the hands. Looking back, both were right in their own way. Each made history, reshaping how we see watches. That’s why placing them side by side is more intriguing than it first appears.
The backdrop of the 1970s helps explain how two such different paths could emerge almost simultaneously. It was the era of the Quartz Crisis: battery-powered watches, precise and cheap to produce, seized a massive share of the market once dominated by traditional mechanical watchmaking. Centuries-old brands shut their doors, entire workshops of artisanal watchmakers disappeared, and for a while it seemed reasonable to bet that the wristwatch, as an object of desire, was nearing its end.
What that decade left open wasn’t “who will win,” but a more interesting question: what makes a watch worth having? Precision, tradition, and noble materials were no longer sufficient answers. Into that vacuum stepped two men, on opposite sides of the globe, with radically different responses.
In 1970, Audemars Piguet asked a freelance Swiss designer for something unthinkable at the time: a luxury sports watch in steel, not gold, priced like fine jewelry. Gérald Genta, inspired by a diver’s helmet with exposed screws, delivered the Royal Oak. A few years later, in a restaurant, he sketched on a napkin what would become the Nautilus, designed for Patek Philippe.
Today, both watches rank among the most coveted in the world, having profoundly reshaped the luxury watch niche. Steel watches had been associated with tools or adventure gear. Paying fortunes for such “tool watches” was once unimaginable. The Royal Oak now averages around $50,000, with rare, complicated models reaching $700,000; the Nautilus starts at $120,000 and can climb to $600,000.
Genta never ranked luxury by material. He took pride in pieces he designed for Timex as much as those for Patek Philippe. For him, value lay in the idea. That conviction, more than market calculations, allowed common steel to carry the symbolic weight of gold.
Meanwhile, in Japan, a young Casio engineer was consumed by his own obsession. According to the brand’s favorite legend, it began the day Kikuo Ibe dropped the watch his father had given him and watched it shatter. The phrase he wrote in an internal meeting was almost childlike in its simplicity: “a tough watch that doesn’t break when dropped.” It took two years and more than 200 destroyed prototypes—many hurled from the third-floor window of Casio’s research building—before, in 1983, the DW-5000C was born: the first G-Shock.
Ibe wasn’t trying to save anything or prove Casio’s prestige. He simply refused to accept the prevailing idea that a watch was, by definition, delicate. His conviction was structural, almost philosophical: an object you wear every day should protect you, not the other way around. The technical solution was to suspend the movement inside the case, floating on shock absorbers. It wasn’t born from an aesthetic sketch but from a pure engineering question: how do you protect a watch from a ten-meter fall? The form came later, as consequence.
And here lies the most delightful coincidence of this story. The Royal Oak of 1972 and the DW-5000C of 1983 share the same essential geometry: the octagon. Genta arrived there by pure visual instinct, staring at a diver’s helmet and seeing a shape no one had dared use in a luxury watch. Ibe arrived at the same place by calculating impact-absorbing structures, without a thought for aesthetics. One saw pure design; the other saw engineering necessity. They lived in radically different worlds, unaware of each other, yet separated by 10,000 kilometers and a decade, they landed on the same form. Proof that sometimes aesthetic instinct and functional logic simply converge, without anyone planning it.
The reason this story still matters isn’t just historical. It perfectly illustrates the two axes around which much of today’s consumption of desirable objects still revolves: buying for the narrative of status, rarity, and heritage on one side, and buying for the almost emotional trust that an object will never let you down on the other.
A steel Nautilus costs what it does today not because steel became more expensive, but because Genta convinced the market that value lies in the idea and in rarity, not in the metal. That logic underpins today’s economy of waiting lists and drives collectors to pay astronomical premiums for common metal.
The G-Shock, by contrast, sold over 100 million units on the opposite argument: that reliability has its own value, independent of status. Today, it ranges from $40 to $400 depending on the model. Not that it lacks its own narrative of desire, history, and rarity—collectors may pay up to $10,000 for an original DW-5000C. And Casio itself openly flirts with the territory Genta opened decades earlier, with titanium and polished finishes in lines like Full Metal and MR-G.
Perhaps the greatest lesson isn’t about watches at all, but about creativity: an object can conquer the world through opposite yet equally legitimate paths in the market—through the promise of belonging or the promise of invulnerability. Gérald Genta and Kikuo Ibe never met. But between a napkin in a Geneva restaurant and a bathroom window in Tokyo, each in his own way sketched reasons why we still buy watches today.
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