Officine Panerai

Tim_M
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Panerai Wasn't in the Market

Hi Edward,

I think it's safe to say that Panerai's lack of market growth between 1956 and 1993 was due entirely to their total absence from the consumer market. From '56 to the debut of the first civilian market Panerai watches, the parent company was far more involved in building instruments as diverse as dive tools, aircraft landing gear, and radio components.

From what I gather, almost all of the serially-produced military Panerai products were built between 1936 and 1956, and all examples from the latter date until 1993 amounted to prototypes, limited runs for foreign allies, and occasional replacements for busted units. By some accounts, this amounted to no more than 300 complete watches over almost forty years. However, an amazing number of those isolated prototypes became design templates for the later pre and post-Vendome Panerai model lines. Watch concepts like the Mare Nostrum, Luminor Submersible, and titanium cases can trace their origins to Panerai design proposals that mostly lay buried in company archives until the 90s. In fact, despite the late 1950s genesis of the crown protector, it might be fair to say even that design first achieved mass production in the mid 1990s.

While Rolex touted its screw down crown and leveraged its distribution network to achieve growth, Panerai simply wasn't in the consumer market.

To use another automotive analogy, Rolex is like Porsche and Panerai is like McLaren. Today, both are respected builders of high performance road cars. The reason McLaren had almost no visible road car presence until recently is because they were a race car constructor for professional teams (most notably, their own), and their business model didn't include the general use consumer.

Best,

Tim