11/24/2023 0 Comments Apple lincoln road miamiIn Singapore a store was forced to shut for 10 days in a bid to let the mayhem play itself out.ĭespite this, Nick Hayek has confirmed that the retail rollout of the Blancpain collab will seemingly be exactly the same as MoonSwatch. In New York, scuffles broke out amid rumors of a stabbing in the line. London’s Carnaby Street location lasted half an hour before police were called. March 26 saw scenes of pandemonium around the globe. What’s more puzzling is that Swatch appears to favor repeating the questionable launch tactics it used for MoonSwatch last year. Watch aficionados prize mechanical movements over quartz. It may be less well known that its stablemate, but it’s fair to say that Blancpain is considered to be a higher luxury brand than Omega within watch circles, which is why Swatch using its automatic Sistem51 movement in this collaboration, and not the quartz offering in the MoonSwatch, makes sense. Not only that, its claimed accuracy of plus/minus 7 seconds a day made it accurate enough to qualify for chronometer status-an honor at the time used as marketing leverage by the likes of Rolex, Omega, and Breitling. It took two years to perfect and shocked the entire watch industry when announced-not just because it dared to feature plastic escapement parts but also for the sheer achievement of creating an automatic watch movement with only 51 parts that boasted a 90-hour power reserve (the norm then was around 40 hours). Echoing the quartz, Swatch set about developing an automatic that would also have just 51 parts. Mechanical watch movements have around 130 components. Inside each of these was a quartz movement at the time considered a technical marvel: it had just 51 parts, a little over half the number required by most quartz movements.įor the brand’s 30th anniversary in 2013 it wanted to replicate this technical feat, only with an equally affordable automatic (or self-winding) mechanical watch. By 2006, the firm was celebrating its 333 millionth Swatch. Swatch launched in 1983 and built its reputation churning out cheerful and colorful plastic fashion watches. Also, not only did Marc Hayek have the benefit of seeing precisely how beneficial such a collaboration would be after the MoonSwatch’s unparalleled success, as WIRED exclusively revealed in July 2022, the group had already produced a rough prototype of a Swatch version of a Blancpain. In contrast to Omega CEO Raynald Aeschlimann’s initial reservations when Hayek first mooted the MoonSwatch, Marc Hayek, Blancpain CEO and Nick’s nephew, was apparently dogged in his determination to be next in line. Second, a Swatch x Blancpain prototype had already been made. First, quite simply, it seems that Blancpain wanted its shot more than rival in-house brands. Gen Zs are not really aware that there’s a brand called Blancpain-this will bring a fresh wind to a brand that has a dusty image.”īut considering the number of brands within Swatch Group’s stable, including the likes of Tissot and Hamilton, why would Nick Hayek opt to ordain Blancpain with the kind of commercial shot in the arm afforded Omega (sales of Speedmaster Moonwatch, which retails for around $7,000, increased in Omega stores by more than 50 percent) after the first internet-breaking and public-disturbance producing Swatch collab? The answer is twofold. “This will raise the overall profile of Blancpain, and it will make the brand more present for the younger generation. All rights reserved.“Even though the Fifty Fathoms is a renowned product, it’s not comparable with the Omega Speedmaster,” says Muller, who adds that a further hitch is that Blancpain has failed to develop a single, iconic version of the Fifty Fathoms, which instead appears now in multiple deluxe iterations.
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