Casio: The Cigarette Ring That Grew Into a Watch That Refuses to Break

Some of the world's most iconic products don't begin with a grand vision. They begin with someone solving a small, specific, everyday problem. Casio's story starts exactly that way, not with a calculator, and not with a watch, but with a ring for holding a cigarette.

A Ring, a Ration, and the Birth of a Company

In April 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, an engineer named Tadao Kashio started a small machining workshop in Mitaka, Tokyo, called Kashio Seisakujo. Japan at the time was impoverished, and everyday commodities, including cigarettes, were scarce and valuable. People smoked theirs down to the very last nub, often burning their fingers in the process.

Tadao's younger brother Toshio, a naturally inventive technician, came up with a simple fix: a ring worn on the finger that held a cigarette, letting the wearer smoke it all the way down without burning themselves, while keeping their hands free to work. This small invention, called the yubiwa pipe, became a genuine commercial success in postwar Japan and gave the Kashio family, Tadao and his brothers Toshio, Kazuo, and Yukio, the capital and confidence to chase something bigger.

From Cigarette Rings to Calculators

That bigger idea arrived after the brothers saw an electric calculator demonstrated at a business exhibition in Ginza. Calculators of that era were slow, mechanical, and clunky. The brothers believed they could build something better. After years of development, in 1957 they released the Model 14-A, the world's first compact, all-electric relay calculator. That same year, Casio Computer Co., Ltd. was formally established, with the four brothers asking their father, Shigeru, to serve as the company's first president.

The name itself tells its own small story. The company initially used the Kashio family name written in Japanese kanji, but in 1960, as the brand grew more recognisable, it was changed to the katakana script, becoming the "Casio" the world would come to know.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Casio kept refining its calculators, culminating in 1972 with the Casio Mini, a milestone that helped shift calculators from expensive business tools into something an ordinary consumer could actually own. But that same accessibility eventually triggered a price war across the industry, and Casio needed a new direction. Toshio Kashio proposed something unconventional: a watch that didn't just display time, but calculated it. In 1974, that idea became the Casiotron, and it shook up the watch industry, introducing Casio to timekeeping for the very first time.

The Watch That Was Born From a Broken One

Casio's most famous product, however, wasn't born in a boardroom strategy meeting. It was born from an accident. In 1981, a young Casio designer named Kikuo Ibe, who had joined the company after studying mechanical engineering, dropped a watch that had been a gift from his father. It shattered. At the time, this was considered entirely normal, watches were seen as delicate, precision instruments meant to be handled gently.

Ibe didn't accept that as the final word. He submitted a proposal at a company meeting containing a single, deceptively simple line: create a durable watch that would not break, even if dropped. The idea was unconventional enough to raise eyebrows, toughness simply wasn't a quality anyone associated with a wristwatch. Still, the proposal was approved.

In 1983, Ibe formed an eight-member unit inside Casio called Project Team Tough, chasing what they called a "triple 10" goal: a watch that could survive a fall from 10 metres, resist water pressure to 10 bars, and run on a single battery for 10 years. The path there was anything but smooth. Ibe tested prototypes by leaning out of a third-floor window at an out-of-the-way Casio building, precisely 10 metres above the pavement, and dropping them onto the concrete below. More than a hundred prototypes failed. The breakthrough finally came from watching a child bouncing a rubber ball, which led Ibe to the idea of suspending the watch's core components in a protective, shock-absorbing structure rather than trying to armour it from the outside. In 1983, after roughly two years of relentless trial and error, the first G-Shock was released.

Proving Toughness, Not Just Claiming It

What makes Casio's story genuinely instructive for marketers is what happened next. Rather than simply telling customers the G-Shock was tough, Casio set out to prove it, repeatedly, publicly, and sometimes theatrically. In the United States, the brand ran an advertising stunt using a G-Shock model as an actual hockey puck, struck by a professional player. The claim seemed so outlandish that it drew skepticism, until independent testing backed it up, and the watch earned the nickname "Hero," later adopted by athletes and police officers alike. That American success eventually made its way back to Japan through youth culture's fascination with American trends, turning G-Shock into a genuine phenomenon in its home market as well.

Ibe himself stayed close to this marketing effort for decades, personally taking part in Casio's "Shock the World" tour, appearing in cities from London to New York, and demonstrating the watch's durability by smashing it against walls in front of live audiences. Behind the scenes, the team continued running extreme stress tests, running vehicles over watches, exposing them to extreme temperatures, and more, treating toughness not as a slogan but as a standard that had to be continuously earned and proven.

That same philosophy carries into Casio's more recent marketing as well. Its newest G-Shock brand campaign is built explicitly around the idea of exceeding expectations, tracing its creative concept directly back to Ibe's original story of pursuing something everyone believed was impossible.

A Brand Built on Proof, Not Promises

Casio's journey, from a wartime cigarette ring to a calculator that changed an industry to a watch that has now sold well over a hundred million units worldwide, shares one common thread. At every stage, the company solved a real, relatable problem, and then went to unusual lengths to demonstrate the solution publicly rather than simply advertise it. In a world full of brands that ask customers to take their word for it, Casio built its reputation by daring people to try and break it.