Casio: how a twenty-dollar watch became a cult object

For decades, Casio was the calculator company that also made watches. That sentence no longer holds. In the year to March 2026, watches brought in 185 billion of its 276.3 billion yen in sales, two yen in every three, and an operating profit of 27.1 billion. What was one more line now holds up the house.

The watch that must not break

The founding story is told by Casio itself: in 1981 development began on a watch able to survive a fall. Its engineer, Kikuo Ibe, is usually said to have set himself a triple goal: ten years of battery, ten bar of water resistance and a ten-metre drop. It took more than 200 prototypes. The DW-5000C arrived in 1983.

It did not triumph where expected. In 1984, a US advert showed a hockey player hitting a DW-5200C instead of the puck. From 1990, the graphics-laden DW-5900C won over US skaters and returned to Japan as an import: Casio went from about 10,000 watches shipped there in 1990 to about 700,000 in 1995. In our view, that loop is the key to the cult: the watch became fashionable on the street before it did in a marketing plan. After the 1997 peak, the brand admits it lost momentum by leaning too heavily on fashion and went back to talking about toughness.

The other cult: the F-91W

The G-Shock has a history. The F-91W has something rarer: almost no pretensions. It came out in June 1989, the work of Ryūsuke Moriai, and cost about 20 dollars; a few years ago it could be had for little more than 10. It weighs 21 grams and its battery lasts about seven years.

Casio does not publish sales. The most cited estimate, about three million a year, would give around 90 million over three decades, and IEEE Spectrum itself warns that it may be inflated. The claim of over 100 million on Wikipedia carries a citation-needed flag. It is, then, the most famous watch in the world with the most uncertain sales figure.

Those figures hide the most recent turn: G-Shock is no longer the whole story. According to Casio, it makes up about 42% of sales in the latest quarter of the year. The rest includes Edifice and, above all, CASIO WATCH, the inexpensive retro range.

Why now

Casio does not hide the cause. In its results, it attributes the worldwide growth of models such as the A159 and MTP-1302 to young people's taste for retro and vintage, and explains that its social media strategy in South Korea spread to neighbouring countries. Its new plan expressly names Gen Z as an audience to address on social media. In the last quarter of that year it even ran out of best sellers, after larger orders than expected.

The 2026 jump has margin behind it: watch operating profit rose from 20.3 to 27.1 billion yen and its profitability went from 12.2% to 14.7%. A margin like that, with watches at a few dollars in the catalogue, deserves more study than it gets. Above that, the brand plays in another league when it wants: a piece from the Dream Project series reached $400,050 at a 2023 auction.

The best example of the present may be the 2019 GA-2100, 11.8 mm thick and 51 grams, an octagonal silhouette for 110 dollars. Fans named it "CasiOak" for its resemblance to the Royal Oak, and that nickname, born in no marketing department, sums up the phenomenon well.

The formula

Editorial opinion: Casio's cult was built not by a campaign but by three things that cannot be bought. A price so low that choosing it is a statement and not a sacrifice. A design that does not change, so it has always been there. And a complete lack of snobbery. As luxury raises its prices, that 20-dollar watch looks more elegant every year, without having done a thing.