Swatch, the watch that saved an industry

By the late 1970s Swiss watchmaking was in crisis. Cheap quartz watches from Asia and a strong franc had priced Swiss mass-produced watches out of the market, and many firms closed. At ETA in Grenchen, the engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, backed by Ernst Thomke, head of Ebauches SA, developed a watch whose case was also its frame, made from just 51 components and assembled by machine.

Swatch, a contraction of second watch, was presented in Zurich on 1 March 1983 with a first collection of twelve models. It was affordable, colourful and Swiss made, and it turned the watch into a fashion accessory. By the early 1990s almost 100 million had been sold.

Swiss banks had asked the consultant Nicolas G. Hayek to plan the future of the country's two largest watch groups, ASUAG and SSIH. He proposed merging them. The merged group became SMH in 1985, with Hayek as chief executive, and was renamed the Swatch Group in 1998. Swatch's headquarters in Biel, designed by Shigeru Ban and opened in 2019, is one of the world's largest timber structures. In 2022 the MoonSwatch, made with Omega, became one of the most successful Swiss watch launches in decades.