The Most Successful Watch Ever Made

If you don't count smart watches, it's the most popular wristwatch in history. You probably own one or know someone who does. And if you're a collector, there's a good chance that this watch has played a significant role in your journey. This is the Casio F91W, one of the most basic yet perfectly designed timepieces ever created, with a look that has barely changed in the decades since its introduction. An easy-to-read dial, along with useful functions including a calendar, alarm, and stopwatch, add up to everything you need and nothing you don't. It's a timepiece that has sold more than 100 million units since its release more than 35 years ago, and shows no signs of slowing down. We'll hear from watch industry veterans, design experts, and Casio insiders during our exploration of how a humble, inexpensive, digital timepiece took over the world, becoming a design icon despite, or maybe because of, its simple brilliance. Before we get started, a bit of context regarding the F91W's place within the greater watch landscape. With total lifetime sales of well over 100 million since 1989, Casio produces in the neighborhood of 3 million F91Ws on an annual basis, making it the most produced single watch model in history, not counting smart watches. Compare that to the Swiss watch industry, which produces around 15 million watches across all brands, and this single model from Casio would make around 20% of the production of the entire Swiss watch industry. So Casio wins this fight in terms of sheer numbers, but due to the low retail price of the F91W, revenue is eclipsed by Swiss watches. Based on 3 million units sold annually, the F91W would generate approximately $50-60 million per year. While this is definitely an apples-to-oranges discussion, it does illustrate Casio's value-led philosophy over the more luxury-driven forces within the Swiss watch industry. You always go back to the F91W. It's brought into the mix, into these movies and television shows, to keep characters grounded. It's inexpensive, it's easy to buy, it's just an easy thing to pick up and put on your wrist. And it literally is almost the perfect watch. To understand the F91W, we need to understand the history of Casio as a company, and how it grew into a pop culture phenomenon. Casio, the company as we know it, was formed in 1946. The first Casio product, ironically, was a smoking device. It was a ring that you could use to mount a cigarette and then smoke a little more conveniently. So you could have hands-free smoking because you're a busy Japanese worker. That's the first Casio invention, right? So it's a convenience gadget. And initially they were doing calculation machines. And that's what they started doing. And I saw some of the first calculators. The first one was the size of a desk, and that was considered miniature. That was like a tiny one. As time went on, Casio refined their technology and manufacturing processes, making their calculators smaller and more convenient. It was these highly efficient, portable, and more affordable calculators that put Casio on the map as the tech company for the masses. The next logical step would be something that consumers use every day, watches. If you ask yourself what a calculator would look like that's wearable on the wrist, that's basically what it is. Casio's digital watches would continue along their evolutionary path from there, with the brand becoming even more well-known during this period of explosive growth within the digital watch space. If you go back to the late 70s, early 80s, when we had the quartz movement had already been out there, this new, exciting, accurate, durable way to tell time. But there were new ways to tell time because with the quartz, with the battery, we now had digital displays. And after a brief dalliance with LEDs, light-emitting diodes, they're really impractical. It uses a lot of power, therefore the watch display is always off until you push a button. So then enter the LCD, the liquid crystal display, always on, uses very little power, but now you have all these new options in terms of how you're going to display time, in terms of actual digits, and then you can have graphs and all this fun stuff. So 1983, Kikuo Ibe, iconic designer in his own right for Casio, came out with the G-Shock. The Casio G-Shock has a super powerful shock absorber. That's why it withstands so much shock. Casio G-Shock. And his desire to make this watch was actually born from childhood. He was gifted a watch by his parents, a mechanical watch, dropped it and it broke. And then he was like, I need to invent a watch that won't break if I drop it. Like, that's cool. And the G-Shock was born, you know, gravity, force, G-Shock, boom, we have the watch. And as successful as the G-Shock was, I think it was overkill for a lot of people. Casio had gone to so much trouble in the 1980s to make these highly semantically complicated G-Shock things, which looked like a Nikon camera with a photomic head, you know, it all knurled and lumpy and textures and all the rest of it. It's kind of a chunky watch. Like, it's not petite, it's not small, it's not lightweight. It's not a subtle wrist presence, is what I would say. There was a need for something simple, something clean, something easy. And then that's where the F91W steps in. At the end of the 1980s, the design process of the F91W was underway. And to Casio, it was just another product. A simple, affordable watch made for everyone. Even its designer had no idea what a cultural force the F91W would become after its launch. And unlike the G-Shock, it didn't have a name that was nearly as marketable or even remotely cool. Casio's goal with the F91W was to create a very affordable watch that could produce at scale. They did not know that they would be producing it for decades. This was about simplicity. It wasn't about adding functionality. At that point, they're starting to get better battery technology. But they started using lithium-ion batteries when those became available. And that increased the battery life to like multiple years, right? So people love this idea because it used to be that you had to replace a battery more than once a year. So when someone said you have five, seven years between replacing a battery, like what? That's crazy. When the final F91W design came together, not only did it offer a value-packed feature set, the look was distinctive and instantly recognizable, with its clean lines, resin construction, and legible dial framed in bright blue. When I look at the F91W, really the thing that I notice the most is that the time is front and center. Like it's very in your face. The numbers are huge. It's super legible. It's super easy to read. And I think it gets, you know, it kind of gets the job done. There's nothing you could add to improve it and nothing you could take away to make it, you know, more pleasing. It is absolutely what it is. It's absolute. The F91W launched in June of 1989, quickly gaining traction as its reputation grew, becoming an almost immediate success, with a typical selling price from $10 to $15 upon its introduction. In 1989, this was truly a revolution in that you had this level of affordability for this kind of technology. And I don't think that can be understated. And that, of course, contributes to a lot of its enduring success. The affordability is the point. The affordability is not something you can separate from the F91W. And that is why it's popular. I mean, let's be honest, you know, if you're going to make 100 million timepieces, it's not going to be the watch that costs, you know, $100, $200, $1,000. It's going to be the watch that's $10, $20. But at the end of the day, that is part of the beauty, I think, of the watch. Casio still positions the F91W as an entry-level product today, with a current retail of $29.95. Manufacturing efficiencies are a vital part of the formula, with the price allowing the F91W to retain unprecedented level of global mindshare. While the F91W has seen incremental upgrades over the years in terms of technology, along with a number of stylistic variations on the theme, the black resin original has never left the lineup. That speaks volumes about its cultural significance. Worn by presidents, public figures, its lasting impact and universal appeal challenges just about any watch in existence. You look at it, it's very much a sign of its times. It is a product of the technology, of the design, of the manufacturing techniques. It reminds people of something. So it's become, in a sense, like an archetype. There were a lot of watches at the time that Casio made that were similar to it, right? But this is like the one that people remember. So the F91W is this remaining vestige. It's still made today. There's really not many watches that have been continuously produced for that long. Whether you like this or not, the strongest watch brands in the world are the ones that really indulge in only incremental updates. They know they have something and they've had it, whether it's for a century, for a few decades. If it's not broken, don't fix it. I think the reason that the F91W is still important and popular is there's a nostalgia factor here, right? And I think what I see with the community members and in the watch collector community is a lot of people have fond memories of it because, again, it was like maybe their first watch. And at some point, it's just out in the cultural stratosphere enough that people just notice it everywhere. People say if you walk around the Upper East Side in New York, you're always going to see a Rolex. But if you're going to walk anywhere in the world, you're inevitably going to see an F91W, whether you register it or not. It's there. It's permeated the world. There's collectors in our community that have like multiple FP Jorns and crazy, high complication, insane watch collections. And they all have a Casio also. They all do. They all have something like this, even if they are super, super serious mechanical watch collectors. It's an iconic design that people have a lot of nostalgia to, whether from pop culture or from their personal lives. And therefore, every time they see it on somebody's wrist, they go, yeah, I remember my experience with that watch. I remember watching it or seeing it in this movie. It's that thing that's just always been a part of my life, whether consciously or subconsciously. To go back to the practicality perspective of an F91W, it is going to perform well in all kinds of scenarios. So you can wear it in the boardroom or on the battlefield. So it's going to be worn by heroes and villains alike. It's a bit delicate, but from presidents to terrorists, probably the most famous wearer of the F91W in recent eras is Osama Bin Laden. I've actually been quoted as calling the F91W a modest masterpiece. I mean, I don't mean to say it compares to Chartres or St. Paul's Cathedral or Titian's Assumption of the Virgin in the Friary Church in Venice, but it is a masterpiece. It is a modest masterpiece of our civilization. It's what our industrial civilization, of which I'm very, very proud, does at its very best. It makes an ordinary thing extraordinarily well. It adds, it creates a sort of sense of, I mean, a luxury experience, that's to say extraordinary accurate timekeeping of a way and a style and an efficiency which wasn't available to the richest emperor or king in the past. So yeah, it's a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece of industrial civilization. The bottom line is that this has been a successful product. There is nothing that is made for several decades because it's not successful. And it's an underdog success because it's inexpensive. And most cheap things have the association that they don't last, they're not made very well. So this is one of the rare exceptions to that rule, where something made to be simple was also made very well, good enough that decades later, it's still somehow relevant. I think it's remarkable. I do believe it is fair to say that the F91W is one of the most successful watch designs of all time. And that is borne by just the empirical fact of the matter, which is that there are over 100 million of these things. That doesn't happen by accident. That happens because it is an exceptional product. It simply works. You put it on your wrist, you know what time it is, it's accurate, and it's great. It offers an accuracy, which is totally redundant, which no one needs, but it's immensely appealing. And so I don't know what the next paradigm shift is going to be in terms of timekeeping. But I do know for a fact that whatever that is, and whenever it happens, right there, you're going to have the F91W saying, yeah, over here, guys, it's still going to be here. And it's still going to work exactly the same way that it did in 1989. Now, more than three decades after its launch into the world, we're still captivated by the F91W. We're still discussing it, debating it, and perhaps most significantly, we're still buying it. The iconic design of the F91W is a prime example of getting it right the first time. And clearly, Casio got it very right. No, it isn't the most advanced wrist watch available. And it certainly isn't the most expensive. But the F91W does something else. With millions of them out in the world, it transcends cultural boundaries, defies trends, and proves the following, that people will always be drawn to a product that does what it says it will, is beautifully simple in its design, and is available at one of the most democratic price points you'll ever find. The Casio F91W isn't just a watch. It's a design icon, not for the elite few, but for everyone.