Is it just me?

Makes my head hurt…

Define "biggest success". Are we talking units sold, monetary value, "hype" exposure, etc...?

I mean, the MoonSwatch is definitely a success, but Omega still sits at the top of the Swatch brands for market share by revenue. Tissot sells a about two million units a year.

I’m looking from the perspective of initial hype and exposure. I definitely don’t have the data on units or monetary value but I would assume they’re both very high. Also when you consider entire watch collaboration with Omega and Blancepain as a whole.

I thought their biggest success was a £30 plastic watch, but I was there in the '80s and didn't buy one so it doesn't matter.

Fair.

My point is just this; the watch community is a small slice of the market overall, and trends in the community tend to get overblown.

Tissot is more popular in the real world than Hamilton, though in the watch community you'd think the rolls were reversed. We end up with a distorted sense of scale, because we live in an echo chamber.

Extremely valid point. It is also been very saturated with the moon swatch over the past few years, with all the post videos and hype. 🍻

You're off by just a (cough, cough) little, 3.1 million.

Fascinating little chat here. I just shrug when I consider the SWATCH group. I try to focus myself on the differences (often enormous) between the various brands. They do have some autonomy.

I don’t think that the movements, within the midrange watches, have very much to do with much, really. I admire them for their ease of use, and why not? I do own a few watches that have ‘exotic’ movements, and man do I love looking at them! I love Tim Mosso’s review videos for that!

Anyway, cheers!

So close… 🍻

Cheers 🍻

The swatch group is a juggernaut! I can't wait to see the swatch/ breguet collaboration!

Based on the table, affordability must be a big factor here as the implied unit price per Switch is c.$125 and way below everything else in the table.

For a comparison, in 2022 Casio reported producing 38 million watches and watch sales of $1.1 billion. Ignoring possible inventory movements, this gives an implied unit price of c.$30.

So if volume is the measure of success then it would seem affordability certainly drives volume (and hence success).

The Swatch Group is a bit of a puzzle to me with quite a few neglected gems. But if maximizing profit is a prime driver then - though I really don’t like them - the MoonSwatch was clearly a big success.

No its not,don't can't be,that's madness I feel sorry for them if it is,they need a knew job 🙄😬🤣

That's a lot under one umbrella so I feel it's a combination of many factors

Product offering don't just come from innovation and new tech, it also comes from looking inward. Yes byproducts come from a source, and this was not funny or ironic, but opportunistic. A good company uses its assets to create new products with what they have so they have an injecting polymer line already in Swatch so why not reconfig the line and create a byproduct with DNA from our best lines. If a company plays its cards right and makes the right moves, which it has done, success isnt funny, its well earned.

Not that surprising…it’s as surprising as finding out that McDonald’s makes more money than any fancy steakhouse or that Walmart and Target are more profitable than Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s.

Yes it is funny that Swatch single handedly saved the Swiss industry during the quartz crisis and every brand under the Swatch umbrella would have closed their doors if not acquired by the plastic watch makers.

It’s all marketing and in the false scarcity they’ve conjured up around those collaborations. They’re capitalizing on that fomo

Swatch it's a big holding company, the brands under Swatch have nothing to do with the way they do their watches, they always made plastic watches from the beginning and still do with great success, that's the way they bring colour and other factors to the market. Regarding the collaboration, if someone thinks it's just a Omega printed on that dial, don't know whats the design and decades of watch history.

Ps. The plastic or steal content on a watch costs very close the same.

Type XXI for sure!

Not odd at all Affordability built the conglomerate That’s where it all started in the 80’s. My analogy would be the t-shirt to the fashion industry. The luxury brands could actually lose money some years but the profit on the mainstream stuff will always be ridiculous

Great comparison, never thought about the t-shirts in fashion that way!

Swatch have been excellent at multitasking. The amount of simultaneous milking they can do puts the average dairy farm to shame.

They seem to do a great job selling each at their prospective price points and not having price battles with all the brands they own.

Swatch just won the hype battle for a flash in the pan victory among watch people not the population as a whole. It was only ever a marketing gamic with choked off supply and a big promotion to double the watch price with one of the flagship brand names on it.

Come on it worked mostly because of the Omega side of the collaboration. I'll give them that the idea of making a watch for each planet (sun & moon) was amazing creativity, but Omega was the key. I love blancpain but most people have never heard of it. When was the last time someone posted anything about that collaboration?

Tissot affiliation with the NBA and Hamilton with Hollywood are examples of the Swatch Group's strong advertising presence. Another collaboration may not be the best idea. I maybe wrong.

Truth! Well said 🍻

I was there in the 80's and still have mine!

Marketing. They're good, hooking people on the affordable fashionable stuff. It wasn't just the Moonswatch, also the PRX.

The majority of the economy has been consumer goods for decades now. Consumer goods in the 80s are why the Swatch Group was able to buy all those old brands. So no, it’s neither of those