(End of the) Swatch generation?
(End of the) Swatch generation? 3 November 2005Pierre M Maillard Editor-in-Chief The very first delivery of Swatch watches into a test market took place in October of 1982 That was 23 years ago a whole generation! Four years after that by October 1986 the company had already sold 225 million Swatch watches around the world and by October 1990 sales had reached 75 million What has not already been said about this small and ingenious plastic timepiece this novel creation that has been credited with saving the entire Swiss watch industry? Lets look back at the context of the epoch one that is not so very far away yet one that is seemingly light years distant in terms of what is happening today The Swatch born during a period of turmoil and distress in the Swiss watch industry represented a true revolution of the times As the sociologist Franois Hainard explains the Swatch provoked a cultural rupture the sudden absence of the temple guardians creating a freedom of expression indispensable for unbridled creativity Without giving up precision the obsessive leitmotiv of watchmakers Swatch continued with the analogue display while the trend of the moment was digital They dared use synthetic materials while watchmaking traditions demanded noble metals They dared bet on a watch with a short lifespan one that was not reparable while tradition was nourished by long-term duration so many divergences that demonstrate how innovation arises from the ability to move away from the dominant norm,Replica Bulova Watch, This move away from the standard thinking of the era (a watch for life) would sweep away everything in its passage and allow the renaissance of the Swiss watch industry by definitively imposing the primal importance of the analogue display over digital Paradoxically this universal watch par excellence would also open the way for a strong return of the exclusive mech-anical watches of Haute Horlogerie,Hamilton Watch, Today these pieces occupy the top of the timekeeping pyramid One only has to look at the latest statistics of the Swiss watch industry Once again they show that the number of ex-ported watches is in continuous decline (-59% for the first six months of 2005) but that their value is systematically increasing (+113% for the same period) The average export price for a Swiss timepiece is now around US$ 329 (at the end of 2004) while the average price of an exported watch from China is about US$ 1 So placed in this context our brave little Swatch is suffering having recorded a 5% to 6% decline over the last six months Does this mean the end of an era? Does it mean the end of a generation? In fact Swatch has proliferated widely and its offspring are everywhere far too numerous to count And those that have prospered the most from this colourful and playful wave are the many so-called fashion brands As is often the case the original has become slightly out-dated and it must now abandon some of its dreams beginning with an illusion that it strongly believed in: that the Swatch would become the platform for all forms of communication technologies But that did not happen The Swatch did not become a telephone, cheap Abercrombie , On the contrary the cellphone has become a watch In fact the cellphone is the watch preferred by the young generations It is now the new norm The answer? Again it is urgent to move away from the dominant norm The future must relentlessly continue to reinvent itself at the risk of reinventing us for better or for worse Source: October – November 2005 Issue Click here to subscribe to replica watches Magazine
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