When Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson was in college at Georgetown, Washington, D.C., 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 super clone 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 perfect replica 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 cheap fake Rolex Air Kings and Oyster Perpetuals printed with the Domino’s logos at the start of the pandemic.
In the early ’80s, Domino’s partnered with luxury super clone Rolex to provide high-earning store managers with motivation to hit lofty 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 replica watches online 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 aaa quality replica 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 best 1:1 fake 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 Domino’s Swiss made replica Rolex (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 high quality replica watches were issued with a tilted logo (this one is Carlson’s favourite)
At first, snobbish watch collectors looked down on the watch. Who, they imagined, would want a luxury watch printed with the logo of a fast-food chain? Ew. The best copy watches were so disliked that dealers would pop the Domino’s-printed dial off the watch, replace it with a logo-less one, and stuff the pizza’d dial into a drawer. Engravings would be polished off and a scrubbed-clean Rolex Air-King fake for sale would be offered to the market.
Many collectors looked down on the DR and the prices bear that point out. These were the “least expensive Rolex copy watches paypal you could buy,” Wind says, selling for between “$1,000 to $1,500 less than a decade ago.”
However, Carlson and Wind, the pizza grease probably still coursing through their veins, viewed them differently. Wind was moved by nostalgia and Carlson, as the leader of a fashion brand, saw another phenomenon. “I always was obsessed with this watch,” he says. “It’s a great high-low moment. A lot of people in the fashion industry have been putting this watch on their mood boards for years.” But while he saw them used as inspiration, he noticed he never actually saw them on wrists.
Carlson started scouring through eBay listings, getting them vetted by Wind. He ended up buying a Domino’s Swiss movement replica Rolex Air-King for himself and a ladies Air-King with the Domino’s dial on it, both for only a few thousand dollars each. Together, Wind and Carlson bought several more when their value was still ascending. Carlson started featuring them prominently in campaigns for Rowing Blazers while selling some on his site. Wind put out a video helping collectors understand the different eras of the DRs, which was suddenly crucial information.