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When Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson was in college at Georgetown, he heard that the Domino’s Pizza located down the street from the university’s dorms had the highest sales among the company’s stores. If that’s true, he and his classmate Eric Wind, now the prominent watch dealer behind Wind Vintage, were major contributors to this feat. Together, the pair would pull all-nighters several times a week to study for their “Modern Empires in Asia” course, frequently ordering Domino’s to fuel them through the night. “Whenever I look at my [Domino’s Rolex], I think of Jack and the late nights of our freshman year,” Wind says.
The watch world is funny in that a random coincidence like this—two horological movers and shakers dorming down the street from a Domino’s in the mid-2000s—can have a massive ripple effect on the collecting community nearly two decades later. Because of Carlson and Wind’s nostalgia for medium-to-good pizza, they got seriously interested in Rolex Air Kings and Oyster Perpetuals printed with the Domino’s logos at the start of the pandemic.
Just the right amount of information about the Domino’s Rolex (DR):
In the early ‘80s, Domino’s partnered with Rolex to provide high-earning store managers with motivation to hit loft sales goals. Hit $20,000 in weekly sales and a watch printed with the bold red-and-blue logo right there on the dial was yours (eventually Domino’s upped the difficulty, demanding four consecutive weeks of $25,000 sales). Domino’s also engraved the Rolex watches with the recipient’s name and TSM, the initials of the pizza chain’s then-CEO Thomas Stephen Monaghan. Wind says that there were several hundred made every year. “They’re not rare, but they’re not common,” he says. “It’s somewhere in the middle.”
Partnering with corporations was pretty common for Rolex once upon a time. There are other Rolex pieces made in partnership with Winn Dixie, Coca-Cola, the Cotton Bowl Classic, Pan Am, Busch, Honda, and the Pool Intairdril Oil Company. However, as the demand for Rolex pieces has grown, this program has mostly come to an end. It’s a hard enough task for the brand to produce enough pieces to satisfy its collector base without adding custom corporate-branded pieces into the mix.
There were three different types of DR made over the years.
- The first were made in the early-to-mid-’80s with a big, “more primitive-looking” box logo, as Wind describes it, at 6 o’clock
- In the early ‘90s, they switched to a smaller box logo in the same location
- Finally, in the mid ‘90s, the watches were issued with a tilted logo (this one is Carlson’s favorite)
