Swatch: The Plastic Watch That Saved Swiss Watchmaking

Swatch is a Swiss quartz watch in plastic launched in 1983. It had only 51 parts instead of about 90, cost around 50 francs and was sold as a fashion accessory in many colours. It helped the Swiss watch industry recover after the quartz crisis.

Facts

The background: the quartz crisis

In the 1970s cheap quartz watches arrived from Japan, especially from Seiko, and the Swiss watch industry was hit hard. Many workshops closed and thousands lost their jobs. Read about the background in the guide to Seiko Astron and the quartz crisis and compare with the Japanese Casio F-91W.

Switzerland had long been known for expensive and precise mechanical watches, like the Cartier Tank, but the market for cheap watches was lost. The industry needed a new idea, and it came from within: a watch so simple to make that it could be produced in Switzerland despite high wages.

51 parts in plastic

In the early 1980s the engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller built a prototype under the leadership of Ernst Thomke at the company ETA. The watch had only 51 parts, compared with about 90 in an ordinary quartz watch. The case was plastic and the movement was laid straight into it, without a separate case back. The parts were welded together with ultrasound, which meant that the watch could not be opened and could not be repaired without being destroyed. The plastic case and the quartz movement made it possible to automate manufacture to a high degree, which kept the price down and allowed production to remain in Switzerland.

That was a deliberate part of the idea: Swatch was a disposable object, cheap enough to be thrown away or replaced. The name comes from second watch, that is, the watch number two. You were meant to have several, one for each outfit and mood. This was a new view of watches, which had earlier been bought for life.

Fashion and art

The first collection came in 1983 with twelve models, and in 1984 the watch began to spread to the United States. The marketing was built on colour and youth, and the watch became a fashion object rather than an instrument. Nicolas Hayek, a Swiss businessman, played a key role when banks and manufacturers were merged into what later became the Swatch Group. See Swatch in the object database. New collections came every year, which brought customers back and made the watches part of the year’s fashion, like clothes and shoes.

From 1985 the company collaborated with artists such as Kiki Picasso and Keith Haring, and special art editions became collectors’ items. It suited the Postmodernism of the time, in which the line between art, advertising and everyday life was blurred. The hundred-millionth watch was sold as early as 1992.

What Swatch taught the design world

Swatch showed that industrial production and low cost could be combined with a strong identity. A product could be cheap and yet desirable, if the form and colour were right. Companies also learned the importance of telling a story: Swatch was not only a timekeeper but an expression of who you were.

Today Swatch exists in countless editions, and the watches are collected by many. You recognise them by the light plastic case, the clear dial and the strongly coloured strap. Older models from the 1980s are especially sought after, in particular those that bear artists’ signatures. Compare with the Tank and the F-91W to see three entirely different ways of thinking about a wristwatch. Together the three show how the same object can be a jewel, a tool or a fashion sign, depending on who makes it and for whom.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Why is the watch called Swatch?