Who invented swatch watches

Smartwatches are not going to completely replace mechanical watches just like the Kalashnikov assault rifle is not going to make samurai swords any less desirable. On the other hand, Switzerland has missed a tremendous opportunity and it is shocking that the leaders of the watch industry do not find the smartwatch market a tempting prospect.

This amount would benefit the entire Swiss watch industry. EM: Clearly! Swatch, on the other hand, should be taking a leading a role. Swiss watchmakers seem to have forgotten how they underestimated Japanese quartz watches in the s as mere gadgets and not real watches. That mistake led to the near collapse of the watch industry.

However, through Swatch, we eventually succeeded in creating a stylish quartz watch. But we then failed to follow up and re-conquer the global watch market through investment in industrialisation. Obsessed by short-term gains, the Swatch group did a complete U-turn towards luxury watches.

Instead of investing in ideas, the group chose to invest in luxury watch brands and showrooms all over the world. EM: It is definitely a risk.

The industry is beginning to resemble a Native American reservation. It has deliberately refused to be a part of recent changes, not through a lack of creativity or innovation, but due to strategic choice. Unfortunately, Switzerland lacks a Steve Jobs who can drag the watch industry into the future. The birth of Swatch came as a right smack because by the time the crisis had reached a severe and critical point.

Lebanese-Swiss businessman Nicolas G. Hayek enters the picture. This merger which Hayek spearheaded coincided with the invention of the Swatch watch that Dr. Thomke invented; Dr. And you cannot sleep! And in a concert, everybody hears it!

In the US, people would queue up whenever a new collection came out. I remember standing in The Plaza hotel in New York and noticing that all the yuppies were wearing Swatches. A lot of designers and artists wanted to design their own. One thing that caused enormous controversy was that the Swatch could not be repaired, but we did tests that showed it had a lifespan of 30 years.

I still have Swatches from Put a new battery in them and they work. Interviews by Etan Smallman. Originally called the Vulgaris … the Swatch. Business was down, factories were closing, and jobs were being lost.

Fortunately, a number of things were happening that would prove to offer salvation for the Swiss. ETA SA, a company that made watches and was headed up by Ernst Thomke, had recently invested in an injection-molding machine at the behest of engineer Elmar Mock.

Mock, along with his colleague Jacque Muller, spent 15 months crafting a plastic prototype watch that was one piece and welded together.

The significance of a sealed unit was that it economized the entire process, turning watches from handcrafted units to models that could be produced by automation. The watches required just 51 parts instead of the 91 pieces typical of most models at the time. In this way, Thomke, Mock, and Muller had produced a timepiece that was both durable and inexpensive. The issue was why someone might opt for a Swatch watch over a digital Japanese model. He released the first Swatch in Zurich in March of But the manufacturing process that allowed Swatches to come in at a reasonable price was also a problem.

Automating the process meant the watches and bands were almost always identical in size and shape. The answer was in the design. The Swatch name came from a contraction of two words: secondary watch.