G-SHOCK: the watch that would not break (1983)

Selling a use no one had asked for

The crux of this decision was to sell not a better watch but a property the watch industry had treated as beside the point: survival. “A watch that won’t break when dropped” ran against a trade built on precision and refinement, and at launch it found no natural home in Japan. Its first believers were American professionals — firefighters, police, the military — who valued the thing for what it could take rather than how it looked. Casio had, once again, offered a use no one had asked for and let the demand form around it, the same demand-creation reflex that had produced the Casio Mini a decade earlier.

What made G-SHOCK matter over the long run was less the launch than what it became. As calculators, cameras and phones were commoditized or swallowed by the smartphone, and as Casio retreated from business after business through the 2000s and 2010s, the shock-resistant watch hardened into the high-margin core that carried the whole company — by the mid-2010s the watch business was earning the bulk of group profit. That was the strength and the exposure at once: the invention that saved Casio also left it “one-legged,” dependent on a single created market, and the task handed to its later managers was to build a second leg beside it.