Built to Be Bought: The twenty watches that won the wrist (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798195301996)

The watches you've heard of are not the watches the world bought.
For every Submariner on a James Bond wrist, there are a hundred million Casio F-91Ws on the wrists of teenagers, soldiers, and accountants. For every Patek Philippe Nautilus on a waiting list, there are five hundred Apple Watches sold this quarter. The twentieth century's most successful object is not the car or the smartphone. It is the wristwatch - and the wristwatch the magazines never wrote about.
Built to Be Bought tells the real story of the wrist in twenty watches, chosen on one criterion: volume. Not prestige. Not pedigree. What people actually paid for.
Inside, you'll find:

• The bathroom-window drop test that gave us the G-Shock.
• The Friday-before-Basel deadline that nearly killed the Royal Oak.
• The Hayek son who overrode his own marketing department to launch the MoonSwatch - and produced the largest single watch hit of the 2020s.
• The spreadsheet at an authorised dealer in 2019 with eighty-plus names against a single Tudor reference.
• Why the F-91W appears on terror watch lists, prison commissaries, and the wrist of the President of Iran.
• How a Cupertino wearable shipped more units in one year than the entire Swiss watch industry combined.

This is a book about money, design, geopolitics, and the strange cultural logic of an object the size of a coin that the entire planet decided it could not live without.
Twenty watches. One century. Ten billion wrists.
The watches that won.

Author: Eleodor Sotropa
ISBN-13: 9798195301996
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 05/02/2026
Pages: 372
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.09lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.77d