This Domino’s-branded Rolex Air-King watch might look like the most bizarre collaboration of all time, or even perhaps a fake, but it’s very much the real deal and the true story behind it dates back all the way to the 1980s.
According to GearPatrol, Domino’s began incentivizing its franchisees with Rolex watches in 1977 when the chain’s founder, Tom Monaghan, gave his highest-earning franchise owner the watch right off his wrist. In his 1986 autobiography, Pizza Tiger, Monaghan wrote, “I wore a Bulova with our Domino’s logo on its face. A franchisee asked what he had to do to get that watch from me, and I told him, ‘Turn in a twenty-thousand-dollar sales week.’ He did it.”
Realizing the gift’s motivational power, Monaghan tied a knot in this marriage of high and low culture, so to speak, by rewarding his employees with Rolex watches through a program called the “Rolex Challenge”. The premise was, basically, if a franchise attained a certain sales quota for a four-week period, they got a branded Rolex Air-King as a trophy.
That sales quota used to stand at $20,000 in one week ($10,000 and you get a Hermés tie), but as Rolexes have become more expensive, Monaghan has raised the stakes to $25,000 in sales in a week, four weeks in a row. The design of the watch has also changed, with one of the most distinctive dials ever made being removed in favor of placing the Domino’s logo to a less visible place on the bracelet (see above) — perhaps realizing that employees might try to have to the dial changed to something less cheesy.
Head over to GearPatrol to read the full story.
In other news, here are the 10 most expensive champagnes in the world.