Swatch Watches
1983-present
Swatches, no not fabric samples, but Swatch Watches,
a flash back from the eighties, right? Well they are still around today,
but they have a significantly different value. They once were a teenage craze.
A mass commodity that was not too pricy and could be found in every location,
from discount stores, to department stores, to specialty stores. Consumers
bought them in droves and wore not one, but two, three, or four, and in their
hair, and on their clothes. They had one to match every outfit.
They were mass produced commodities and the Swiss
made a mint off them.They did not represent a time or a place, as of yet.
They were simply the new watch obsession.
James Clifford, author of "On Collecting Art
and Culture,"1 would have located 80s Swatches as inauthentic,
non-art, on his masterpiece vs. artifact and authentic vs. inauthentic
chart:
They
were like any other fad fashion, such as hot pink spandex, only to be around
a short while. Though, somewhere along this downward plummet from the heights
of popularity to depths of disregard, Swatches outlasted their era and moved
from non-art, inauthentic, to the authentic culture, a phenomenon Clifford
does not often see, but his work does help to explain it. Swatch, Inc. did
motivated this move through their post-'84 marketing strategies and their
later counter-strategies, as well as those of the collectors, to encourage
the new Swatch culture of collection, not fashion, in the '90s.
The
Swatch was the savior of the Swiss watch industry. The mid 1970s were grim
years for the Swiss. The Japanese had captured the market with their introduction
of the digital 'Delirium,' (photo left) a watch with the worlds thinnest
wrist band and the least number of components. In response to the crisis
the Swiss founded the Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking
Industries, SMH. And what was the result? You guessed it, the Swatch. It
was a high quality, slim, plastic watch, with only 51 components(refer to
picture at right), at a low price.
Introduced
to the market in 1983, it is the most successful wrist watch of all time,
with 250 million units sold to date, not only on the 80s.
As with punk rock, leg warmers from Flash Dance,
charm necklaces, jelly bracelets up and down both arms, neon colors, and......the
swatch watch was a relic of the 80s. They defined an age, but what caused
the Swatch to forge ahead into the 90s leaving the others in the dust? One
reason was the popularity of the swatch which created a new definition for
the need for a watch. Before the mid-eighties it had been an accepted fact
that people needed and wanted only one watch, or two at the most - one for
dress and one for casual - so watch manufactures centered their promotions
around accuracy, and size, or weight. Consumers were not going to be buying
new watches everyday. Purchasing a good watch was like purchasing a car,
you only need to do it every so often, so manufactures had to net a large
profit on each watch, rather than sell a lot at a small profit.
As time past and technology increased the difference
in accuracy and size between bottom line watches and top line watches decreased
to the point where the value in the difference no longer mattered for the
consumer. None the less, Swiss watch manufactures still tried to prevent
the news from coming out. They, however, were unsuccessful, and Japanese
digital watch manufacturers cleaned up at the marketplace, meaning a wave
good bye to the Swiss.
Then came the Swatch, whoosh, and the market
turned around. The digital style was out, at least for a while. Now it was
time for the Swiss to shine again. They started out as simple and plain
"color-block" watches (refer to ad above at left) and then gradually went
wild in order to fully encapsulate the market .
Swatches were decorated with anything from
blue
pasta:
to
Keith Haring originals:
It was here, these marketing strategies employed,
that guaranteed the success of the Swatch well into the future. The Swatch
was no longer at the same level as the Japanese digital watch. It had moved
beyond to become "rare period pieces and thus collectibles (old green glass
coke bottles)," as said by Clifford.1
Today,
swatches are not available at every store and are quite pricy. In fact you
have to search to find them, especially if you have a particular one in mind.
This is due to more than one factor including: the artistic design of the
Swatch watches, new Innovations, marketing strategies, and strategic
distributions systems set up by Swatch Inc. Swatch capitalized on the idea
of product line extensions and variations like no other company has. Swatch,
Inc. knew that in order to keep its interest up beyond the 80s craze it had
to make some changes.
The artistic design of the watch was a key factor
in its success. Initially "the swatch" was designed with simple color blocks
(see "Time for fashion! Time for Swatch!" ad above). As the idea of different
color blocks for different occasions took on, i.e. owing more than one watch,
Swatch realized that if they varied the design even greater, then current
consumers would certainly increase their 'collection,' and new customers
would be attracted (hopefully) by the new product extensions.
Right from the decision to increase variation,
Swatch looked art for inspiration,though the artists themselves, as of yet,
were not actually asked to put their name on the creations. Swatch used
influences from the pop generation (refer to Swatch above), the renaissance,
celestial works (refer to Swatch directly below) , oriental influences (refer
to Swatch below the Swatch directly below) and such art works such as
David.
This trend started in 1984 and continued in all of the forms of the swatch from the pop swatch (refer to Swatches at left) to the scuba swatch to the maxi swatch.
The first year of the Swatch, 1983, was really
a tough one for Swatch. It was not until 1984 that Swatch coordinated the
Swatch look with the correct marketing style (refer to ad below at left),
but once that occurred Swatches were flying off the
shelves:
To further capitalize on the success of the art
inspired swatches, Swatch, Inc. made a full commitment and asked a range
of artists to design one to four watches. These artists
included:
Valerio
Adami Pierre Alechinski
Pol
Bury
Jean Michel Folon
Sam Francis
Massimo Giacon
Keith Haring
Alfred Hofkunst
Alessandro Mendini
Mimmo Paladino
Kiki Picasso
Matteo Thun
Niklaus Troxler
Felice
Varini
Not VitalT
Tadanori Yokoo
These designer watches are today the ones driving
the collector market. They go for the most and are the most widely and
extensively searched for (not an easy task).
Along with the fact that certain Swatches were
designed by great Artists, such as Keith Haring, going through such extraordinary
life situations (a gay life style and dying of AIDS), there were other reasons
for swatches move from a daily commodity to a collectable cultural art and
they have to do with aspects that Swatch, Inc. can.
Swatch
was not going to make it easy for collectors to get a hold of complete lines
or collections. If the collectors wanted the full collection they could
potentially order it direct form Switzerland, a complicated task, or search
out every swatch outlet for a list of their inventory. Swatch sends each
store Swatches on its own prerogative. Stores are not allowed to ask for
certain styles. They have to take what they are given. Also Swatch runs only
a certain number of each design, only 100-300 for the entire world. This
is why if you look on the web certain styles go for ten to twenty times their
originally intended price, but if you just have to have it then you are willing
to pay.
Some would say that "the Swatch" has lost its
way. Its initial intention was to be a functional, extremely accurate,
competitively priced, every-day type watch. Today, it is viewed as a high
priced collectors item never to be warn. I would not say that it has lost
its way, but rather that it has found its way to years of success. Fads and
fashions die, but symbols of authentic culture live on, valuable, forever.
Swatch was able to move its plastic creation from the realm of the mass commodity
to that of culture. The swatch is no longer looked at as an 80s thing but
as a valuable work of the modern world and of the art culture
itself.
The movement of the swatch from the inauthentic
to the authentic, mapped out by Clifford, and its win over the Japanese Digital
watch sheds some light on the existing complex relationship between producers
and consumers. If the producers were in full control of our buying habits,
then the Japanese digital watch would have won hands down. The Japanese watches
were cheaper and worked just as well. However, the system does not work that
way. We pick and choose, at the same time producers try to persuade us to
buy their products. Consumer add their own social value to the Swatch, one
of the main reasons people start collecting them in the first
place.
One collector started her collection because
of an experience with her first Swatch:
Six years ago, this is an interesting
story, I lost my original Swatch at the beach. But come next spring I found
it again, still intact, and still ticking away. I was so impressed that I
had to start collecting.
"In the West...collecting has long been a strategy
for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity," as said
by Clifford.1 The collecting of the Swatch was the final step
that made it truly authentic. Swatch Watch, Inc., may have done everything
in its power to push Swatch owners to the point of collection, but they could
never force them. Swatch collectors did it on their own. They added their
own value to the Swatch:
I collect them as memory reminders.
One I picked up in St. Thomas and now when I look at it now it reminds me
of the trip and the fun time I had.
Some collectors, though, are using the value the
authentic collectors have created for their Swatches to their monetary advantage:
It is definitely for sentimental reasons,
and as I said above it developed from a personal
experience.
They
are only in it for the money. This detracts from the authenticity, but it
is unavoidable. After all, Western 'possessive individualism,' analyzed by
C.B Macpherson (1962), "traces the seventeenth-century emergence of an ideal
self as owner: the individual surrounded by accumulated property and
goods."1We define ourselves by our collections, whether they are
formally displayed, heaped around, or used every day, we make the final choice
of what to obtain and retain. The producers only have a small part. They
may start the ball rolling, but the individual decides the speed, size, path,
and momentum.
The Swatch Man himself!
The co-founder, Chairman of the
Board of Directors and Chief
Executive Office of SMH, with
headquarter in Biel, Switzerland.