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Swatch watches today represent an authentic art form, piece of material culture originated from the eighties. Swatch fans collect them, get obsessed over them and even hang them on the wall.
The History of Swatches
Swatches’ initial intention was to present a functional, accurate, affordably priced, every-day type watch. They once were regarded as a teenage craze. These mass-produced not too pricy items could be easily discovered in every location – in a discount or department store, as well as in a specialty store. They were purchased in droves and worn sometimes together with other three or four models not just on the wrists but also in their owners’ hair, and on their clothes. They could match any outfit.
Swatches managed to outlast their era and turned non-art, inauthentic mass production into the authentic culture. Swatch, Inc. did their best to motivate this move having developed their post-'84 marketing strategies, as well as took care of encouraging the new Swatch culture of collection, not fashion, later in the '90s. The Swatch was one of the factors that saved the Swiss watch industry from the crisis caused by the appearance and domination of Japanese quartz watches.
As the means of defense from to the crisis the Swiss established the Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries, SMH. As the result, the Swatch, a high quality, not expensive, slim, plastic watch, featuring only 51 components was introduced to the market in 1983. It became the most successful wrist watch ever created, with more 250 million units sold to date. The popularity of the swatch attached a new meaning to the need for a watch. Before the mid-eighties it had considered a usual thing that people needed and wanted only one watch, or a maximum of two timepieces - one for dress and one for casual wearing. It explains the fact that watch manufactures paid their attention to promoting accuracy, and size, or weight. Consumers had no intention to buy new watches everyday. A purchase of a good watch was equal to buying a car. Manufactures expected to make a large profit on every watch, rather than sell a lot at a small profit.
The Swatch turned the market all around. The digital style was ignored, at least for a while. The time came for the Swiss to be shining again. Having originally presented simple and plain watches, they gradually went wild and fully conquered the market.
Swatches’ Success
Today, you will not find swatches available at every store and their prices have grown significantly. These timepieces have gained the hearts of their fans and collectors due to such factors as the artistic design, innovations and variations, successful marketing strategies, and strategic distribution systems held by Swatch Inc.
The artistic design of the watch became the key secret of its success. Initially "the swatch" design was concentrated at simple color blocks. Different color blocks were aimed at different occasions. Swatch realized that the increasing variety of the design would certainly increase the 'collections' of their customers and would attract new customers. Swatch looked for inspiration in the world of art, though the artists themselves were not actually asked to mark their names on the creations. Swatch used the ideas from the pop generation, the renaissance, celestial works, and oriental culture.
Today, these designer watches are greatly appreciated at the collector market and are the most extensively searched for.
Collecting Swatches
Swatch was not going to make it easy for collectors to acquire the complete lines or collections. If the collectors needed the entire collection they would face a complicated task of ordering it direct form Switzerland. They could also search out every swatch outlet for their inventory. Swatch supplies each store with Swatches on its own prerogative not giving stores the opportunity to ask for certain styles. Also Swatch produces only a certain number of each watch design, only 100-300 for all the world. This is why the price for some styles is ten to twenty times higher than their original price.
The swatch is no longer perceived as an item of the eighties but as a precious work of the modern times and of the art culture. Consumers have added their own social value to the Swatch, one of the major reasons people enjoy collecting them in the first place.
Nowadays, featuring an important collectable status, Swatch owners club comprises about 80,000 members worldwide. The price for many new Swatches is around ?30, yet the most exciting solo collector’s Swatch, the Kiki Picasso model, created in 1985 by French designer Christian Chapiron and launched in an extremely limited edition of 140, reaches ?20,000 at auction. Among the Swatch most precious masterpieces there is the 1983 Original Jelly Fish, a simple see-through “skeleton movement” having a smooth plastic strap; a 1985 Velvet Underground that seems to have been wrapped in an old fishing net. A really awesome design is reflected in the 1991Verdura . It features the shape of a long pointed tongue with a huge blister in which the working watch face is situated. The model is worth about ?2000.
In 1994 the company offered the ?1000 Tresor Magique, a platinum-cased timepiece in limited number of 12,999 examples worldwide, 1000 available for sale in the UK. The company produces 270 designs a year. The production of some 140 of the designs is stopped after half a year to encourage collectable cachet. Collectors are known to purchase three of each likely collectable Swatch model for different purpose - one for wearing, one for trading and one kept in its original, unopened and often extremely fancy pack.
Among the celebrities associated with Swatch designs there is Jean-Michel Jarre, photographer Annie Leibovitz, Yoko Ono, Paco Rabanne, Vivienne Westwood and Keith Haring.
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