It may not have been in space (yet), unlike the astronaut watch whose design it takes up, but it is already in orbit.
The Swatch X Omega MoonSwatch has already sold a million copies in the space of eight months.
This is what Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, has just confided to Andrea Martel of the daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung, ahead of the group's annual results.
The MoonSwatch, no doubt already the watchmaking launch of the decade, both in terms of its surprise effect and its impact, will therefore also have broken sales records.
And this despite the difficulty of obtaining one in a Swatch store, the eleven different
“missions”
, each corresponding to a planet and a color, not being voluntarily on sale on the Net.
“I don't think there has ever been a watch name so quickly known in the world,”
he recently told Le Figaro.
We followed our instincts, our ideas, trusted the creativity and the industrial power of the group, everything prepared in the greatest secrecy.
When the Covid came out, we wanted to offer consumers a fun, quality, “Swiss made” product, with real added value and which had no alternative.
It's an Omega, but it's still a Swatch.”
The result is there, with sales well above expectations, a price twice as high as a standard bioceramic Swatch.
According to watch industry expert Olivier Muller, this launch to be taught in a marketing school would have brought in a whopping 200 million Swiss Francs (199 million euros) to the group last year.
But this launch will also, if not above all, have made it possible to recreate the affluence in shops in decline, while rejuvenating Omega's clientele and introducing this new generation to the space legend of the only watch to have officially accompanied the American astronauts throughout the conquest of space.
Now on sale at 260 euros each in 180 stores, instead of 110 until then, the MoonSwatch will also see its production increase,
with two different sites in Switzerland, Granges and Bettlach.
Because, another feat to underline, these MoonSwatches are still and always Swiss Made, exactly forty years after the launch of the first Swatch in 1983. Proof if it were needed that the group knew how to keep its initial course fixed at the time when it was a question of saving Swiss Made watchmaking from the Japanese surge: having both powerful and renowned brands and a complete industrial tool to produce and sell watches made in Switzerland by the millions.
And now, for Swatch's 40th anniversary in early March, what will be the surprise Swatch collaboration unveiled this year?
Omega Seamaster James Bond, Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, Breguet Type XX, or even Audemars Piguet Royal Oak?
Everything is possible…