The very first delivery of Swatch watches, into a test market, took place in October of 1982. That was 23 years ago, a whole generation! Four years after that, by October 1986, the company had already sold 22.5 million Swatch watches around the world… and, by October 1990, sales had reached 75 million.
What has not already been said about this small and ingenious plastic timepiece, this novel creation that has been credited with saving the entire Swiss watch industry?
Let’s look back at the context of the epoch, one that is not so very far away, yet one that is seemingly light years distant in terms of what is happening today.
The Swatch, born during a period of turmoil and distress in the Swiss watch industry, represented a true revolution of the times. As the sociologist François Hainard explains, the Swatch provoked “… a cultural rupture, the sudden absence of the temple guardians, creating a freedom of expression indispensable for unbridled creativity. Without giving up precision, the obsessive leitmotiv of watchmakers, Swatch continued with the analogue display while the trend of the moment was digital. They dared use synthetic materials while watchmaking traditions demanded noble metals. They dared bet on a watch with a short lifespan, one that was not reparable, while tradition was nourished by long-term duration… so many divergences that demonstrate how innovation arises from the ability to move away from the dominant norm.”
This ‘move away’ from the standard thinking of the era (a watch for life) would sweep away everything in its passage, and allow the renaissance of the Swiss watch industry by definitively imposing the primal importance of the analogue display over digital.
Paradoxically, this universal watch par excellence would also open the way for a strong return of the exclusive mech-anical watches of Haute Horlogerie. Today, these pieces occupy the top of the timekeeping pyramid. One only has to look at the latest statistics of the Swiss watch industry. Once again they show that the number of ex-ported watches is in continuous decline (-5.9% for the first six months of 2005), but that their value is systematically increasing (+11.3% for the same period). The average export price for a Swiss timepiece is now around US$ 329 (at the end of 2004), while the average price of an exported watch from China is about US$ 1.
So, placed in this context, our brave little Swatch is suffering, having recorded a 5% to 6% decline over the last six months. Does this mean the end of an era? Does it mean the end of a generation?
In fact, Swatch has proliferated widely, and its offspring are everywhere, far too numerous to count. And, those that have prospered the most from this colourful and playful wave are the many so-called fashion brands. As is often the case, the original has become slightly out-dated, and it must now abandon some of its dreams, beginning with an illusion that it strongly believed in: that the Swatch would become the platform for all forms of communication technologies. But that did not happen. The Swatch did not become a telephone. On the contrary, the cellphone has become a watch. In fact, the cellphone is the watch preferred by the young generations. It is now the new norm. The answer? Again, it is urgent to move away from the dominant norm. The future must relentlessly continue to reinvent itself, at the risk of reinventing us, for better or for worse.
Source: October - November 2005 Issue
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