Why Rolex releases compromised models sometimes...

[Maxy]

Most of them relate Rolex for being Perfect or near perfect watches and not compromising on anything. But eventually they end up compromising watches by design, by production, by release timings etc. Watch hands are one of the bigger items and Rolex tried to consolidate all the watch models to the same/similar watch hands to produce them together at once(even moving Exp2 to merc hands).


For example: During 214270's release everyone mentioned the usage of short hands on the Explorer. Why does Rolex do it?

As its known knowledge that Rolex produces everything in batches and not year round production. For example for next 6 months they manufacture watch hands for usage for next 3-5 years plan(as they seem it appropriate). So, when they are upgrading all the Subs, GMTs, Explorer 2 from the previous generation watches and they will have stock of watch hands left over from the previous manufacture set. Lets say they have stock of 100K of hour hands which they can't use it any of the new Submariner models. So even knowing that its little short on the dial on 214270, they will use it as to not to waste it such a big stock of hour hands.


Once that stock is over, they don't mind upgrading the hour hands as they did it in 2016.

Air-King 40mm: Same thing, they might have stock 3,6,9 non-lumed numerals of 214270 remaining which they again can't let it go waste. What do they do? They end up using it in the upcoming Air-King 40mm model even it messes up the design horribly and has no place for it on the dial. They still will use it till the stock is completed and once all the complaints are raised all over, they will make another Air-King model without that 3-6-9 and just replace them with 15,.30,..45 on the dial.



New 214270: Again, they consolidated both Air-King and new 214270 watch hands and it ended up looking beefier on the Explorer dial whereas the old Merc hour hand looked elegant. All it needed was little longer hour hand but Rolex compromised by trying to consolidate with the Air-King model.