Important Notes

The Brand

Everyone knows a Swatch when they see one. There’s clearly something that makes Swatch different from every other watch brand. What is it? The look, the colors, the plastic? The design, perhaps, or the fact that it’s Swiss made and versatile enough to be worn with almost anything. There are Swatch watches for people of all ages, and a Swatch for every occasion. But there’s more to Swatch than market coverage. Swatch is an attitude, an approach to life, a way of seeing. The sight of a Swatch excites emotion. Wearing one is a way to communicate, to speak without speaking. Heart to heart.

The Swatch Revolution

The story of Swatch is the story of a revolution. In 1983, the unexpected appearance of an affordable, Swiss made, plastic watch turned the watch world upside down. Suddenly, a watch was much more than a way to measure time. It was a new language, a way to speak from the heart without words. A Swatch watch was an expression of joy, a provocative statement, a warm smile delivered with a flick of the wrist. More than 30 years later, the revolution continues: Swatch talks, and everyone understands.

It wasn’t always that way.

The Adventure Begins

In the late 1970s, a Swiss watch was a work of careful craftsmanship, a uniquely valuable timepiece handed down from one generation to the next, to be cherished for a lifetime. Fitted with a complicated, hand-crafted mechanical movement, it was the expression of a culture in which changes took place (if they took place at all) only after much deliberation, and even then at the speed of glaciers. New models were introduced, but changes in how watches were made were few and far between. And then? Then came the crisis—not entirely unexpected, but serenely ignored for much too long. Overnight the market was flooded with watches from Asia equipped with quartz movements. They kept good time—most were at least as accurate as even the best mechanical watches—and they were cheap. You didn’t have to save for months or years to afford one. Worst of all, people were buying them! Even the Swiss were buying cheap watches!

It didn’t take a genius to see what was happening. In a few short years, the value of Swiss watch exports was cut in half. The Swiss share of the market dropped from over 50 to 15 per cent, and competition from Asia slashed the number of watchmaking jobs in Switzerland from 90,000 to fewer than 25,000: Swiss watchmakers were an endangered species.

Enter Nicolas G. Hayek, whose radical proposals and revolutionary ideas were to lead the industry from its near-death experience to unprecedented health today. Chief among Nicolas G. Hayek’s big ideas was that of a ‘second watch’ — not an expensive piece of well-crafted jewelry, but a new, fascinating way to say who you are and how you feel : elegant, emotional, provocative, seductive… And because it didn’t cost a fortune, a second watch was soon followed by a third, a fourth... and the rest is history. In 2006, Swatch celebrated the production of the 333 millionth Swatch watch, and in 2015 continues to reinforce its position as one of the biggest brand names in the world, known everywhere as a maker of entertaining, colorful and exciting watches in tune with the times and lifestyle trends.

Along the way to brand-name stardom, Swatch established an enviable reputation as an all-around innovator, applying its creative smarts to everything from research and technology to product design and manufacture, marketing, communication and retail distribution.

From slow, patient craftsmanship to high-tech design and high-speed manufacturing

In the late 1970s, faced with the growing popularity of inexpensive quartz watches, a group of engineers in Fontainemelon (Neuchatel) developed a super-thin, gold luxury watch known as Delirium Tremens. At just 1.98 mm and later at 0.98 mm in thickness, it was the thinnest watch ever made.

An initial response to the Asian challenge, its secret lay in its radical simplification. The traditional division into three parts (bottom plate for the movement, case, and frame) had been abandoned in favor of a one-piece case, the bottom of which also served as the bottom plate for the movement. But a thin, expensive watch would not be sufficient to stave off competition from the cheap quartz watches flooding the market. A more radical approach was needed, and the drive to simplify was soon complemented by a search for new materials and methods that would allow the production of an entirely new kind of Swiss watch — one made of a synthetic material, shock-proof, accurate, perfect for mass production, affordable for everyone, and available in a wide range of colors...

The first Swatch watches were precisely that — quality Swiss timepieces, made of plastic.  In the weeks and months following their launch, Swatch took the world by storm. Ever since, the brand has continued to push the limits of technology, introducing an astonishing range of materials from plastic, stainless steel and aluminum to synthetic fabrics, rubber and silicone. The company continues to find new ways to impart texture and color to an expanding range of shapes, and inventive designers take advantage of everything technology offers. The radical reduction in the number of parts known as “Revolution 51” enabled innovative assembly methods, and special packaging technologies make it possible to deliver the products in pleasing and captivating containers. Continuing advances in design, materials and production technologies have enabled the brand to make even mechanical watches accessible to a much broader range of customers. In particular, Swatch Sistem51 has brought radical change to the manufacture of mechanical watches : in 2013 Swatch presented the first-ever mechanical watch designed for automated assembly.  The revolutionary new design combines design-led Swatch DNA with the dynamic mechanics of an automatic (self-winding) mechanical watch. A transparent case back, ring rotor and expanded printable surfaces render the movement even more fascinating. Like the first Swatch watches more than 30 years ago, Sistem51 has challenged the Swiss watchmaking industry to re-invent itself. Sistem51 has expanded the horizons of the mechanical watch, at a price much less than even the most accessible Swiss made mechanical timepieces. Since its initial presentation in 2013, demand for Sistem51 has grown rapidly, requiring repeated expansion of production capacities.

Marketing and Communication

Founder Nicolas G. Hayek’s ‘second watch’ was never just a watch. It was always also a way to communicate, a ‘talking piece’ designed to let the wearers show just who they are and how they feel. It’s no surprise, then, that Swatch places great importance on communication with its customers. Today, creative retail is the name of the game, and Swatch has monobrand Swatch stores, megastores, shop-in-shops and kiosks all over the world. Today Swatch points of sale make use of highly modular environments to provide a clean, simple setting in which the watches, their colors and creative design are the center of attention, allowing them to speak for themselves. The concept can be seen in New York City at the prestigious Times Square megastore, in Shanghai at The Swatch Art Peace Hotel, in Paris at the Champs-Elysées megastore, in Beijing in WangFuJing Street and in Hong Kong in the Luk Hoi Tong Tower. These locations have set the stage for more openings at prestigious locations on all five continents.

In 2013 Swatch celebrated its 30th anniversary at the annual watch fair in Basel, Switzerland. The spacious Baselworld booth became Planet Swatch, which evolved each day to reveal the rich diversity of the brand and served as the launch platform for the newly developed mechanical watch, SISTEM51. The prototype on display attracted enormous attention from the general press and from the industry. Sistem51 has demonstrated the innovative strengths of Swatch and Swatch Group, and thrown down the gauntlet to the mechanical watch industry: innovate, differentiate, take advantage of advanced technologies to refresh a proud Swiss made tradition.