Swatch is a Swiss watch company founded in 1983 by Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller. It is a subsidiary of the Swatch Group. The Swatch product line was developed as a response to the "quartz crisis" of the 1970s and 1980s, in which inexpensive, battery-powered, quartz-regulated watches were competing against more established European watchmakers focused on artisanal craftsmanship producing mostly mechanical watches.
The name Swatch is a contraction of "second watch", its concept of "low-cost, high-tech, artistic and emotional" watches marketed as casual, disposable accessories.
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History
Swatch began development in the early 1980s under the leadership of the then ETA SA's CEO Ernst Thomke with a small team of watch engineers led by Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller.
Conceived as a standard timekeeper in plastic, Franz Sprecher, a marketing consultant hired by Thomke to give the project an outsider's consideration, sought to create a fashionable line of watches.
Swatch was originally intended to re-capture entry level market share lost by Swiss manufacturers of mechanical watches and the subsequent growth of Japanese companies such as Seiko and Citizen in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also meant to re-popularize analog watches at a time when digital watches had achieved wide popularity.
In 1983, the group hired Jacques Irniger—who formerly served as the marketing executive for Colgate and Nestlé—to launch the swatch.
The first collection of twelve Swatch models was introduced on 1 March 1983 in Zürich, Switzerland. Initially the price ranged from CHF 39.90 to CHF 49.90 but was standardized to CHF 50.00 in the autumn of the same year. Sales targets were set at one million timepieces for 1983 and 2.5 million for the year after. With an aggressive marketing campaign and relatively low price for a Swiss-made watch, it gained instant popularity in its home market.
Lebanese entrepreneur Nicolas G. Hayek, together with a group of Swiss investors, took over a majority shareholding of Swatch during 1985 in the newly consolidated group under the name Societe Suisse de Microelectronique et d'Horlogerie, or SMH. He became chairman of the board of directors and CEO in 1986. Later he changed the company's name to Swatch Group.
This combination of marketing and manufacturing expertise restored Switzerland as a major player in the world wristwatch market. Synthetic materials were used for the watch cases as well as a new ultra-sonic welding process and assembly technology. In 1997, the Swatch Group opened about 60 stores worldwide.
Product lines
There are families under the Swatch brand:
The Originals are plastic-cased watches. They are available in various sizes, shapes, and designs. The Originals consist of various sub-families as well.
The Irony family contains all the metal-cased watches produced by Swatch. These include both quartz-driven and automatic mechanical watches that can be serviced. The automatics have a 21J/23J ETA 2842 movement. This movement is exclusive to Swatch and is derived from 2824 to 2822.
Irony Chronograph was introduced in 1996 (type/code: YCS101).
The Skin family contains two sub families: Original Skin and Skin Chronograph. The Original Skin was introduced on 6 October 1997 as a thinner version of the original Swatch watch. It is ultra thin, standing at 3.9 mm (1⁄8 in), hence the name Swatch Skin. The Swatch Skin later went on to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's thinnest plastic watch. The Swatch Chronograph is simply the Swatch Skin with a chronograph function, adding two additional buttons on the side of the watch.
The Bijoux line is a jewelry line Swatch released in the new millennium; it partnered with Swarovski to encrust the Bijoux line of watches.
The Digital Touch line, launched in 2011, derives its name from the touchscreen technology used. In contrast to other Swatch families, a digital LCD shows the time. Various models in different colors of the display are available, which include backlighting for reading in the dark.
These Swatch models of wristwatches with a quartz movement are additionally equipped with a near-field communication (NFC) chip to accommodate contactless payment. As an improved second generation, Swatch introduced the model Pay for the Chinese market in July 2017. Unlike the Bellamy, Pay can be programmed and activated in Swatch shops using a Cloud Computing service operated by several Chinese banks.
Swatch introduced Sistem51 at Baselworld 2013 as "the world's first mechanical movement with entirely automated assembly." The movement uses 51 components anchored to a central screw with automatic winding and a 90-hour power reserve – and is 100% Swiss made on a 20-metre-long (65 ft) automated assembly line in clean-room conditions, without human intervention.