In April, the president of the Swiss Confederation (and de facto head of state), Ignazio Cassis, visited Japan to hold talks with the country’s prime minister, Kishida Fumio. As is customary, gifts were to be exchanged, and Cassis’ office requested an example of what had just become the hottest Swiss watch to launch in years, if not decades: the MoonSwatch, a $260 Swatch-produced version of Omega’s Speedmaster Moonwatch, the chronograph famous for being worn by NASA astronauts on the moon.
The Swiss president, however, was out of luck. “We were pleased, but we told them, the only way that he can get the watch is if he sends someone from his office queueing and hoping that at the Swatch shop in Bern they can find it,” says Nick Hayek Jr., chief executive of Swatch Group, the world’s largest watch producer, which owns both the Swatch and Omega brands.
Hayek, a 67-year-old billionaire who drives himself to work in a Mini and has a pirate’s flag flying outside his office, prides himself on the fact that privileged access—a feature of the luxury watch world—is entirely absent with the MoonSwatch despite the intense demand. “It doesn’t help if you have deep pockets. The Patek Philippe and Rolex client, the Breguet client, the Richard Mille client, they all rang. They all want one. But even if you give us $10,000, it makes no difference. You have to wait, you have to buy it in the store. That’s the game changer.”
But finding the MoonSwatch at any Swatch shop anywhere has been a question of luck, timing, and sheer endurance since its launch on March 26 to scenes of pandemonium around the globe.
News had been dripped out gradually during the preceding week. On March 17, cryptic ads appeared in select newspapers with blank pages bearing the legend: “It’s time to change your Omega … Swatch” and “It’s time to change your Swatch … Omega.” Social media feeds hinted at something with a planetary theme before the timepieces were announced on March 24: eleven Swatch watches faithfully resembling the iconic Speedmaster Moonwatch, but battery-powered, in bright colors, and made from Swatch’s ecoplastic alternative, Bioceramic.
The colorways were inspired by planets in the solar system: there was the Mission to the Sun in bright yellow, the Mission to Neptune in deep blue, the Mission to Jupiter in beige and orange, and of course the black Mission to the Moon, closely resembling the Omega original.
As a mash-up of high and low, luxury and affordable, legendary and novelty, the MoonSwatch follows the blueprint of ultra-hyped, worlds-collide collaborations that have become a staple of the fashion world: Gucci x Adidas, Tiffany x Supreme, Balenciaga x Barbie. In fact, it’s a model that Swatch itself pioneered: Its collaborations with artists, designers, brands, institutions, and more (including NASA itself last year) have been central to its identity—“joy of life, and positive provocation” as Hayek defines it—since the 1980s. But bringing this to the austere world of luxury watches, with a riff on one of the most collected, lionized, and theoretically untouchable models ever made, had little precedent.
“These are two brands known worldwide, two brands with a clear message on the opposite side of the scale, and a total surprise for everyone,” says Hayek when I ask him why the MoonSwatch has caught on so. “It’s simple to understand for everybody, whatever background you have. It was straight to the heart of the people.”
Once news of the product was out, along with the message that distribution would be limited to just 110 physical Swatch boutiques worldwide, the hype train took over. At Oxford Street in London, the queueing began soon after the announcement on March 24, even though the watches would not be on sale for two more days. Around the world tents were pitched, lines formed, and crowds grew.
On sale day, store managers found themselves facing throngs of thousands, many of them “scalpers”—seasoned resellers who ply their trade in the worlds of sneaker culture, street fashion, and PlayStations, intent on charging high markups. Swatch's original plan to allow buyers two watches each had by then been reduced to one each, hardly helping a mood that had reportedly changed, in several cases, from camaraderie to restlessness and agitation. It hasn’t changed much since.
At 9 am on March 26, stores opened. London’s Carnaby Street location lasted half an hour before police were called, and all three London shops were forced to shut. In New York, scuffles broke out amid rumors of a stabbing in the line. A Swatch shop in Singapore was forced to shut for 10 days in a bid to let the mayhem play itself out first.
At locations around the world, police were needed to assist staff as the vast majority of punters left empty-handed: most of the shops had fewer than 200 watches available. Deals were done within queues as scalpers flipped watches for profit to those waiting outside. Within minutes of the first sales, MoonSwatches were hitting eBay and other platforms, attracting bids into the thousands.
“We informed everybody: It’s not limited; don’t buy on the internet from flippers; you will be able at some point in time to get your MoonSwatch,” says Nick Hayek when we meet at Swatch Group’s HQ in Biel, Switzerland, a couple of months after the launch. He rejects the idea that Swatch could have been better prepared. “We knew for sure this would be a success, because the product is beautiful, provocative, high quality, and the price is fantastic, and we kept it a secret. But what happened … I think nobody in the world could have expected that. It was really crazy.”
The crowds may have dispersed, but the MoonSwatch’s continuing lack of availability, with restocks selling out in moments and Swatch declining to make them available online, has led to widespread consternation. Some of the comments on Swatch’s Instagram posts, not to mention across Reddit, Discord, and Facebook, do not make pretty reading.
Except, that is, from those who happen to have gotten hold of a MoonSwatch. What could have been construed as a downmarket desecration of a legendary timepiece has received near universal enthusiasm: It’s imaginative, fun, expressive, and reaches across cultural divides.
“It’s very daring and very positive,” says James Marks, head of Phillips Perpetual, the contemporary watch division of the Phillips auction house. “It’s captivating the next generation of collector with a play on something that’s otherwise inaccessible to them. You now have all these people globally who have this bright watch on their wrist that has history, intrigue, the connection to space.”
“I’d love to get one,” Marks adds, “but I haven’t even handled one.”
The targeting of this next generation is perhaps the most enterprising part of the MoonSwatch launch. Luxury watch buyers are not young: A recent study of 8,000 people by an insurance firm in the UK found the average age of the Rolex owner in the country to be 68. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch now outsells the entire combined Swiss watch industry, taking its biggest chunks out of the market for battery-powered watches, where Swatch operates. What better way to expose a completely new, younger audience to Omega than through such an affordable collaboration? And it seems to be working. Hayek says that since the arrival of the MoonSwatch, Omega stores are seeing a spike in sales and footfall.
According to Derek Morrison, general manager EMEA for StockX, an online marketplace for collectible sneakers and streetwear, the MoonSwatch has had huge cut-through with the platform’s Gen Z audience. The site reported more than 2,000 MoonSwatch trades in less than a week after launch and had seen over 11,000 trades by June.
“It’s the best-selling watch release in StockX history, and it’s had the highest premium of any item released this year,” Morrison says. “There’s a lot of foresight, from a branding point of view. If this is a discovery point for Omega, it compares with what Virgil Abloh [the late fashion designer and Off-White entrepreneur] did so well: using an approachable medium to shine a light on things that have been reserved for the elite, and inspiring them to learn more about them.”
More simply, Swatch will obviously benefit financially from MoonSwatch, which will give the brand a welcome revenue boost. In the early 1990s, Swatch sold 20 million watches a year. But sales in 2021 are down to 3.2 million. Morgan Stanley estimates Swatch could sell up to 500,000 MoonSwatches this year alone, providing revenue of $128 million. If the MoonSwatch's estimated gross margin is indeed approaching 90 percent ($115 million), it would restore the brand's fortunes. And keep in mind MoonSwatch has not yet been launched in China. Once it is, total annual sales could hit one million units.
Yet according to Nick Hayek, it was a determination to highlight the qualities of Bioceramic, the novel material introduced by Swatch in 2021, that prompted the MoonSwatch’s development. Developed and patented by Swatch, Bioceramic amalgamates a polymer made from the oil of castor beans with zirconium oxide, a ceramic substance used for scratch-proof, robust, hypoallergenic cases in high-end watchmaking. The result is an evolved form of plastic with the scratch-resistance and solidity of ceramic, a silky matte finish that’s noticeably different to that of “normal” plastic, and a greatly reduced carbon footprint (it should be noted, however, that Bioceramic is not biodegradable).
It also delivers a sharper profile than typical plastics—the precise contours of the Speedmaster case, with the complex planes and angles of its famous twisting lugs, are unlike anything in a traditional plastic Swatch watch. But in the fast-paced pop culture world that Swatch inhabits, Bioceramic is a tough story to sell in.
“I was thinking, how can we make Bioceramic become more of a reality, because it’s technical and difficult to communicate,” Hayek explains. Other Swatch Group brands were interested in working with the material; while Hayek was determined that it should remain a Swatch product only, he was aware that the status and heritage of a classic watch could raise Bioceramic’s profile. Hayek showed me early prototypes for potential Bioceramic versions of Blancpain’s famous dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms, and Omega’s Seamaster 300. But there was only ever one real contender.
“We were doing the NASA Swatch [released in late 2021], and it made me think about the Speedmaster,” he says. “It was on the Moon, it played a principal role in one of the most mythical moments in world history: There’s a real story to be told to many young people in the world who don’t know it. I thought a collaboration between Swatch, an icon, and the Omega Speedmaster, another icon … that would be a real provocation.”
Hayek had a Speedmaster prototype made on the quiet and showed it to the curator of Omega’s museum, Petros Protopapas, who gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Raynald Aeschlimann, Omega’s CEO, took more convincing. “At first he was pale when he saw the Omega Speedmaster as a Swatch, with a quartz movement,” says Hayek. “I said maybe we could do it as a customer service watch while you’re getting your Speedmaster serviced. He said okay, we can think about it.” Once Aeschlimann saw a more fully realized product, however, he was sold.
In the meantime Hayek was able to poach Omega’s head of product, Gregory Kissling, to oversee “Galileo,” the internal project code name, which was conducted in total secrecy within Swatch. “A Swatch person would have done me a Swatch. Gregory understood that he’s not making an Omega product, but he’s not making only a Swatch product. I needed that Omega input,” Hayek says.
It was Kissling who thought of creating watches linked to the colors of the solar system and including references to historic Speedmaster iterations. The red-and-white Mission to Mars version, for instance, with its strangely shaped chronograph hands, is inspired by the white dial and large red outer casing of prototypes made in the early 1970s for the “Alaska Project,” a short-lived research program to produce the ultimate watch for space travel. The orange detailing found on the Jupiter model quotes the so-called Ultraman Speedmaster worn in a Japanese TV show from the ’70s of the same name, another collector favorite.
Conversely, the MoonSwatch's chronograph layout is the element that shows most clearly that it’s a Swatch. The chrono movement that the brand has been using for years has the two upper subdials positioned at 10 and 2 o’clock rather than at 9 and 3 o’clock. Only the third subdial, at 6 o’clock, directly emulates the original Omega Moonwatch.
“It means there are all these layers you can peel off, all the little subtleties,” says Hayek. “If you want to find the historical connections, why this hand is like this or this detail is a certain way, you can—but even if you don’t see the connection, it’s cool. This is a fantastic dimension.”
Underlying all was the focus to push the bioplastic technology further, particularly in the creation of new colors. “It’s not easy. This is an entirely new material, so we’re doing everything for the first time,” says Hayek. “We challenged our production facilities and labs to go further, to invent more, and to create colors that are not yet used. It had to dynamize the production.”
That Swatch Group can develop and make Bioceramic at all goes back to the initial success of Swatch when it launched in 1983 under the leadership of Hayek’s late father, Nicholas G. Hayek (the Hayek family retains a 39 percent stake in the company). At the start of the 1980s, Hayek Sr. had been tasked by creditor banks with turning around the fortunes of a group of watchmaking companies, Omega among them, that had fallen into insolvency during the economic crises of the ’70s, during which the Swiss watch industry was on the verge of collapse. It was the huge success of the fun, plastic Swatch watch, launched by the group’s ETA subsidiary in 1983, that helped reenergize Swiss watchmaking more broadly and poured millions into the coffers of Hayek’s fledgling conglomerate. He took it private in 1985.
The result today is a sprawling empire composed of not just blue-chip brands such as Breguet, Longines, and Tissot, but high-tech production hubs, research laboratories, and component factories. Through this network of intellectual property and technology, Swatch has been able to develop, patent, and manufacture Bioceramic entirely in-house. Other industries are sniffing around, claims Hayek, as the potential applications are myriad. But all the Bioceramic he can make, he needs for Swatch.
The manufacturing process is complex and delicate. First, the raw ingredients of the material—the castor oil polymer, zirconium oxide powder, and chemical pigments—are fed into a complex extrusion machine, which amalgamates them at controlled temperatures of around 200 °C (minute variations in temperature can affect the color uniformity). Out of this, spaghetti-like strings of Bioceramic emerge that are then cooled and granulized to form a feedstock ready for injection molding.
This in turn produces the Bioceramic parts, including the monobloc case, the pushers and crown, battery cover, and a loop holding together the Velcro bracelet. Every element of the process, from the initial combining of the feedstock elements to the injection molding of finished parts and their assembly, along with the manufacturing of the movement, dial, and crystal, is completely automated.
Various subsidiaries within Swatch Group play a role, making production as much of a logistical challenge as an engineering one. ETA, a vast and historic manufacturer of watch movements (it remains the dominant supplier of movements to the Swiss watch industry), also houses the Swatch production facilities. The Bioceramic extrusion and injection processes take place at its headquarters in Grenchen while automated assembly lines are found at its other factories nearby. Comadur, a pioneer in the field of ceramics (as used in particular by Omega and Rado within Swatch Group), creates the zirconium oxide powder; along with Asulab, an advanced research facility, Comadur also creates the special chemical pigments for the Bioceramic feedstock.
“Many of the things we’re doing are so new, we had to develop processes as we went,” says Hayek. Even the microprinting of a photorealistic rendition of a given planet, found on each MoonSwatch’s circular battery cover, required a new technique to deliver tiny precise images using ink droplets of just six microliters (one millionth of a liter). “We did the homologation for these processes step by step during the production, in parallel, because we were driven to be as quick as possible. The more time we took, the more time there would be for information to get out. We knew if that happened, it would have lost a lot of the disruptive power.”
The production has been remarkably quick. Gregory Kissling’s concept was presented to Hayek in August 2021 and the first MoonSwatches were made in February this year—the month before the launch. Hayek says that to make the injection mold tooling for the various Bioceramic components would normally have taken six months. It was achieved in six weeks.
Evidence of the speed of this process emerged when some owners of the deep-blue Mission to Neptune model found blue stains on their wrists after wearing. With Bioceramic, full saturation colors are harder to achieve than the pastel hues with which the material was launched last year. For colors like the red of the Mission to Mars model and the Neptune blue, the feedstock is given additional passes through the extruder to compound the material more densely and fix a higher degree of pigmentation. But with the Neptune, it seems the scales were tipped too heavily. Swatch Group says that the staining occurred with a small proportion of wearers and lasted only a few days. (My experience trialing a model bears this out: An initial blue residue on my wrist stopped appearing after a few wears.)
Nevertheless the Neptune was swiftly withdrawn, and a new recipe for the color is being concocted. But the fault has had a diverting side effect: Due to their rarity, the few Neptune models appearing on resale sites are fetching eye-watering prices compared to the other models. As of June, the pre-owned sales platform Chrono24 was showing a handful of Neptunes listed at around $2,400 or more. Most MoonSwatch models, meanwhile, have settled at market values of between $480 and $1,100—still a fantastic return on an ostensibly unlimited $260 watch.
For most people, then, the MoonSwatch remains out of reach. The frustration among prospective buyers has been compounded by Swatch’s vague communications on the likelihood of ecommerce availability: Messaging that the MoonSwatch remains unavailable online “for now” suggested that it will be at some point in the future. Hayek himself confirms that there are no plans to sell MoonSwatch online, but is less certain about future strategy. “Ask me in four months if ecommerce can play a role … perhaps … I don't know,” he says. It’s something of pertinence to those who live either far from a Swatch store, or in areas—South America, Scandinavia, India, for instance—where there is no physical outlet.
In truth, the question is moot. Even if it wanted to, Swatch does not have the capacity to serve the inevitable frenzied online demand for MoonSwatch. Indeed, Hayek states that the machines are running at full capacity, 24 hours a day, just to try and meet the demand in the brand's 110 bricks and mortar locations. “Regardless, our aim is not to hurriedly throw out millions of MoonSwatches into the market and build three times more factories instantly, which you cannot do anyway. The MoonSwatch isn't about making as much money as possible in the shortest possible time period.”
Capacity, however, will increase: New manufacturing equipment is being installed, including two extrusion machines for the creation of the feedstock (which Hayek says is by far the most onerous part of the process), more injection tooling, and more printing machines. The investment in a single product line—for a company that makes more than 3 million watches a year—is colossal.
Hayek is probably right to reason that, while resellers are an inevitability of any hot product, the tight distribution has at least limited their access to the MoonSwatch. An online drop would expose Swatch to the bots and scalpers that bedevil everything from sneaker launches to the PlayStation 5. To frustrated customers, he reiterates that the MoonSwatch is neither limited nor a short-term product—there will be millions of MoonSwatches.
“The crazy prices of speculators will come down, because it is not limited, neither in time nor in numbers. Everybody wants to have it, but we cannot serve everyone at once,” he says. In the postpandemic consumer landscape, Hayek reckons, patience has become a vastly underrated virtue. “If the world is serious about sustainability, you cannot make everything available to everybody instantly and comfortably, with a click. This world thinks everything is a commodity, but the MoonSwatch is not a commodity. This is about innovation, beauty, fun, and positive provocation. And last but not least, Swiss made.”
