The Swiss answer to quartz

What happened

By 1983 cheap quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong had brought the two big Swiss groups, ASUAG and SSIH, to the edge of insolvency. On 1 March 1983 Ernst Thomke of ETA presented twelve plastic quartz watches in Zürich at 39.90 to 49.90 francs. About 400,000 sold in the first six months, and the two groups were merged that year into the company that became the Swatch Group.

Who

Engineered by Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller at ETA in Grenchen under Ernst Thomke; the marketing idea came from Franz Sprecher. Nicolas G. Hayek, then a consultant, led the merger and later the group.

Why it mattered

Switzerland had been losing the low end of the market to Asia for a decade. The Swatch won it back with a Swiss-made watch as cheap as the imports, then sold it as fashion: a “second watch” bought for its colour and changed with the season, in a market that had treated a watch as a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Its profits and its factories paid for the revival of the group’s mechanical brands.

Worth knowing

Fifty-one parts instead of about ninety-one. The plastic case is the movement’s baseplate, the watch is built in from the front, and the crystal is welded on ultrasonically, which made it water-resistant and impossible to open. The case-as-baseplate idea came from ETA’s Delirium of 1979, the thinnest watch of its day.

Where it is now

The Swatch Group’s own collection at Biel; the first-year models are common in collectors’ hands.

Historian’s noteThe Swatch was not the first plastic watch and not the first watch to use the case as a baseplate, so it is listed as a turning point, not a first. Its place here rests on what it did to the market, which the Swatch Group itself calls the initial spark of the industry’s upswing.

SourcesSwatch Group · Europa Star, 1983