Omega Swatch Speedmaster
swatch.com
swatch.com
These are some really interesting color combos and an attractive chrono. I'm considering one having seen them.
I'm finding this Swatch x Omega craze to be highly ridiculous. The new watches look like cheap fakes. At least with the weird plastic (sorry, bioceramic) and funky colors nobody will try to pass them off as the real thing. Still, it cheapens the brand and the mark of quality the Omega logo used to represent when these plastic / quartz / velcro pieces flood the market and perform like a Swatch and not an Omega.
People like Omega because it's the watch that first went to the moon, it's the watch of James Bond's wrist, and it's the watch that times the olympics. That's the classiness people want to be associated with. Not with the urban appeal of a bunch of people trying to scalp these like they're Supreme hats.
I agree that this cheapens the brand.
Fun fact: Bulova is the "other" moon watch, after an unfortunate mishap with David Scott's Speedmaster.
Re: moonswatch; The hands are too short, the second hand is shaped incorrectly, the chronograph registers are in the wrong spot, the text is in the wrong spot, the case looks like chinese backyard forge pot metal, it’s on a cheap looking Velcro NATO instead of a bracelet, etc.
At a glance from 10’ away it might look like a speedy pro, but not up close.
I think we agree.
https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/style-beauty/omega-...
The craziest thing is that this is not a limited edition, since the planned production run is hundreds of thousands, and probably more now given the hype.
unpopular opinion but crossing over these brands only makes sense if you think youre capable of targeting a lower income customer without risk of damaging your existing luxury brand, or if your existing luxury brand is floundering.
I suspect its the latter, and i suspect its confirmation that the last decade of rennaisance for Rolex is starting to impact the bottom line at Swatch. younger customers are going to gravitate to a smart watch, older customers are going to look for the pedigree of the movement and its lineage so where does this even fit?
Bioceramics and bioglasses are ceramic materials that are biocompatible, full stop. throwing this in is just a buzzword Swatch hopes its customer wont take the time to investigate too thoroughly. theres no real reason to have it on a timepiece.
call me a cynic, but mark my words...in 10 years time youll see the same phenomenon with these watches as you saw with Timex. repair shops wont touch them, and they exist as a valueless testament to disposable faux luxury.
You've actually got it precisely backwards here. Omega, like most other Swiss luxury watch brands, has been absolutely killing it these past two years. Profits are up substantially. Omega is doing fantastic*. What isn't doing fantastic is Swatch -- their numbers are down substantially over the past decade. Smart watches are really killing them. An Apple Watch is not a replacement good for a $6k mechanical work of art, but it absolutely is a replacement good for a similarly priced quartz watch with fewer features, which is exactly what Swatch makes.
So I view this as a successful attempt at leveraging the brand value of Omega to prop up their lower-end brand.
> call me a cynic, but mark my words...in 10 years time youll see the same phenomenon with these watches as you saw with Timex. repair shops wont touch them, and they exist as a valueless testament to disposable faux luxury.
You're being over-dramatic here. And you don't generally repair cheap quartz watches like a Swatch anyway; you replace the battery as needed, and eventually in some number of decades they stop working entirely and that's that. You could do a movement swap at that point if you really wanted.
* See https://watchesbysjx.com/2022/03/morgan-stanley-watch-indust...
Nope. Rolex produces significantly more watches than Omega. Rolex is in a class of its own year -- no other manufacturer commanding such a high price is making remotely as many watches.
Besides, the whole point of the replica market is to have an omega on your wrist, not a Swatch.
IMO they could have put an auto movement in, but then it becomes waaaay closer to a Speedy and way more likely that people start going "is the 5k price difference worth it?"
You're right though - not only does it put the price up, it would then beg the question of "Why the extra for a 'real' speedmaster?"
Not even close, Swatch Group is the largest part manufacturer and was previously required by Swiss Anti-trust authorities to supply their own competitors with parts. It’s only in the last decade Swatch Group has been able to begin terminating contracts to supply competitors with the goal of not supplying any brands outside Swatch Group. These changes have hurt everyone but Swatch.
Pretty much in the last 2 years every luxury Swiss watch has set their own sales records, and Omega is no different, they can’t meet demand.
The bioceramic (i.e. plastic) MoonSwatch is about meeting the demand for Omega while being able to sell it under the Swatch brand. Rolex has the same problem not being able to meet demand, but they don’t have the luxury of being able to print and sell plastic watches.
In fact the first thing I did when I got an Android Wear watch was create a custom face which looked like a Moonwatch (Omega is twitchy about it, so you can't just buy one, apparently.)
Am I converting the price correctly? Are these less than $300!?! [Edit, Yep, $260] Wow. It sorta makes my watch - now owned by my son who has never worn a watch in his life - a little less special, but hey. If more people can own one, I'm all for it.
Here's an article in Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/omega-and-swatch-moonswatch/
If anything, I think this makes your real moonwatch more special. This was the biggest watch release in many years, and its success redounds to the reputation of the real deal moonwatch. The two aren't remotely comparable. You have a hand-crafted luxury mechanical chronograph (which is a few steps up from your basic mechanical 3-hander). The Swatch is a plastic, quartz, mass-produced disposable consumer good. The only thing they have in common is they look similar. Even functionally, they aren't the same; the Omega beats at 6 ticks per second and can time up to 12 hours, whereas the Swatch only beats at 1 tick per second (thus making it look like a cheap quartz) and can only time up to 60 minutes.
The only way I can see how this might've reduced the reputation of the real deal would've been if it had flopped.
So to get a hybrid, combining one of my favorite watch style/designs with one of my favorite watch brands at a price point that I can afford on my current salary? Count me the heck in. I can buy one of each of this set and still not have spent as much as I would on a new Speedmaster.
You know who this probably hurts the most? Corgeut, Phylidae, Pagani Design. I'll bet their Speedmaster homages are going to be far less popular now that we can get a legitimate watch with Omega Speedmaster on the dial.
But even beyond that, many people who're into watches really don't care what other people think about them.
that's been precisely opposite of every interaction I've had with watch enthusiasts.
in fact, that's been opposite of every interaction I've had with any luxury-goods enthusiast, cars/watches/planes/art , you name it; if it was expensive and rare you're likely going to hear about the purchase at lunch.
people don't tend to want to bring up their new 9 dollar Casio or their 1997 Corolla, go figure.
I’m around people who spends thousands on a single garment from brands that the unacquainted wouldn’t know about, but the trained eye can tell the difference. There’s a saying in fashion, “if you know, you know”. Some people just like well designed and nice clothing, and yes, they want to look cool, but they don’t need people to know it’s expensive.
It depends on what OP think of as “luxury”. Maybe for fashion, OP will think of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, but those are Veblen goods as other commenters have mentioned. Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, Maison Margiela, basically all the Antwerpen fashion designers are equally expensive as those “luxury brands”, but the untrained eye would not recognize them. Dover Street Market, not Sak’s Fifth.
Vacheron Constantin is an analogy with watches ( in terms of brand familiarity ).
With this said, the real elitism is the people who buy expensive stuff with the intention of being esoteric or that people don’t understand/recognize.
> people don't tend to want to bring up their new 9 dollar Casio or their 1997 Corolla, go figure.
But people do bring up what’s great about Toyota. I think you’re projecting. I’ve spent $200k worth of men’s wear over the past 5 years, but I’ll still praise and highlight Uniqlo, especially Heatech.
It just happens to be that stuff from H&M and Zara is trash. And niche, therefore expensive, products are making an interesting or artistic statement, whether that is functional or not. No one is buying these thousand dollar watches for the function. A Toyota is about function. It’s literally designed to be utilitarian, and utilitarian is usually not the most provocative as with art.
Fun fact, the real Omega Moon watches given to the Apollo astronauts was also a Velcro band.
Don't worry, I just went to check, and it's still a good watch.
You are paying a substantial premium for the name Omega on the front of the watch.
Here is one website that can give you an idea of how much a watch should cost built out of premium materials, but not with a luxury brand name. Steinhart watches being a great example of quality from a non luxury brand. [1]
No one really believes the parts that make up a Rolex Submariner are worth $12000. It's worth that much because it's a Rolex. You can actually buy quality forgeries for under $1000 that you'd likely need to take apart the entire watch to prove it's a fake.
I would never ever buy a new Rolex. Maybe a really old one, an antique, but not a new one. To cite the famous actor Nicolas Cage from the master piece movie Gone in 60 Seconds: "I saw three of the at McDonalds yesterday. And that tells me that there are too many people with too much money and not enough taste in this town". Rolex, to me, is like a golden Bentley, only their to show even the poorest dude that you are rich. Money doesn't buy taste or style so. Some Rolex are nice, most seem to be bought by people only to show of wealth.
Not to judge so, because there are certainly enthusiasts out there that own the Rolex of there dreams.
I owned a tag, it was partially made from rubber, it was a formula 1 series watch, the rubber perished, was bad.
> I’ve never seen a nice looking Rolex.
Fwiw, this is not a commonly held opinion. You can't argue taste, but most would disagree. What kind of watches do you like the looks of?
1. It has generated significant attention- which has value.
2. Like a BMW 1-series, I imagine the idea is that once people have the "beginner" version, they'll aspire to upgrade to the real thing. It gets people "on the boat".
3. Rolex sells a cheaper version of their flagship watch under the Tudor brand- it's virtually identical and hasn't diluted Rolex's brand value.
4. The funky colors is probably less to do with style and more a guarantee it'll never be confused for the "real" version.
That all said, I would definitely still be salty if I owned a Speedmaster. But I applaud Swatch for making bold and interesting moves- which doesn't exactly happen much in the luxury industry.
Unless you're saying the entire watch collectors market is a scam driven by companies and not collectors.
Do you think Action Comics #1 would drop in value if DC reprinted it? No. It's worth $3 million because the collectors care about the history that represents and the rarity of finding the original. Otherwise it's just ink on shitty paper. Collectors are deciding the value of the original and it can't be manipulated by merely making a new version. Omega would have to start selling the real thing for less money to tank the price. A clone can't do that.
People aren't going to stop buying the original either. Think about knock off designer handbags. It's easy to get a really high quality fake. But no one is buying the fakes if they can have the real thing. A watch collector sure isn't buying the fake since the movement would play a big part in owning that specific model. You want the same model that went to the moon. Not the plastic version.
Even if the supply of the clone is not constrained, I bet some colours are more popular than others, leading to some natural rarity. And in 50 years if they stop making these things and regular people throw them away, that Pluto watch will be worth more than the Mars and a complete collection will be worth even more. All they have done is create another thing for watch enthusiasts to collect.
There's a reason why Patek doesn't sell a $1000 version of their watch, or why Porsche doesn't make a Corolla competitor.
If you disagree, then you're free to do so. Just understand you're disagreeing with people with a lot more practical experience, knowledge and skin-in-the-game than you.
Also, as someone who's not that into watches - the Neptune and Mercury Swatches are gorgeous.
Brand prestige is huge. A much better example here is the Volkswagen Phaeton. A truly stunning product at a great price point - significantly better than the luxury cars it competed with - but it failed because no one wanted to spend their luxury money on a brand associated with affordable normal products.
It failed because there wasn’t a huge market for gimped S-classes among the E-class buying segment.
The only people interested in Phaetons ended up being corrupt mid-level politicians in eastern Europe, they had full time drivers but didn’t want to be seen in a S-class.
Also keep in mind that for the price of a V8 phaeton you could’ve had such cars as a V6 LS.
Had the phaeton been just a bit nicer, it could very well have survived. But that’s not the car VW built.
The minimum cost for an Omega watch is around $5,000. The Moonswatch that we're talking about here in this discussion is a Swatch. It may additionally have the Omega name on it, but anyone and everyone knows that it is a Swatch, produced to normal Swatch standards, on a Swatch assembly line. It has nothing to do with the line of mechanical Omega watches besides having the name on it.
The existence of an officially licensed Porsche toy car does not degrade the value of a real Porsche. Same for this Swatch.
Don't treat people like they are rational, because they aren't. If you seriously think the Moonswatch isn't canabalizing Omega's brand cache- just ask yourself: If Casio put out the exact same product with the exact same design, would people be lining up to buy it?
You don't actually need to answer that, because as somebody else pointed out, the Pagani Speedmaster already tried it, and it clearly didn't work.
People aren't buying this because they like the design, they are buying it for the Omega logo.
Try to justify it however you will, but at the end of the day, that $250 watch is an Omega watch in the eyes of those who buy it. It might not be a "real" Omega, but it'll still be an Omega watch. And that's too bad for those with "real" Omegas. Because nobody wants to be lumped in with a bunch of hypebeasts and dead-beats who spend an afternoon lining up for a toy watch.
I have a more expensive watch but my daily d(r)iver is a Seiko SKX009. Indestructible and with a bracelet upgrade it looks great. And here in Asia you see a lot of marketing for Seiko, and tons of shops. And there’s always Grand Seiko if you want to make watch snobs STFU. Or mods if you want to out-nerd the watch nerds.
I don’t own a Toyota yet but I probably will buy one soon!
Anyway, this is a testable hypothesis. All we have to do is wait and see.
Cheaper in this case means starting at around 3-5k$ not 300$. Also you have to be pretty into watches to know that Tudor is a Rolex brand. It's not really something they advertise.
Omega specifically can’t meet demand and while that might sound like a good problem to have, they can print these moonSwatches, I’m sure the upside to this is significantly greater than any perceived knock on their luxury brand.
The industry is talking about this as a marketing tactic to get new watch buyers in the market, but I think that is a bigger unknown than any potential perceived dilution of the brand only if because retail has prepurchased Omega’s future production for the foreseeable future.
While not "easy" per se, you could probably score a precious metal or two-tone Rolex at a dealer without a ridiculous amount of difficulty. I'd say you could get a SS Oyster Perpetual or DateJust (barring certain exceptions - i.e. the Tiffany dial) without too much difficulty too, unless things have changed drastically in the past few months.
This is the same strategy used by single malt whiskey brands. They have bottles that defined them as company, but they also sell tons of un-aged whiskey to the mass audience. They gobble it up because it's got the brand name. Most of their revenue comes from these lower end, higher margin whiskeys.
An official quartz version of one of the most iconic watches of all time and super cheap comparatively. Though some serious collectors would still say overpriced for what it is (quartz/plastic).
For reference, there’s a very popular variant of the Speedmaster Professional that uses a sapphire crystal rather than a hesalite (basically plastic) crystal. Despite never having been used in space (since the shattering crystal is a risk) the sapphire model is still considered a “professional” edition and highly sought after. People who wear it enjoy the aesthetic of the spacefaring version with the earthly practicality of scratch-proof sapphire. The Swatch version’s desirability is just the same logic a taken a few more steps. It’s made by Omega, has the same basic design, and evokes the imagery of the space race.
Alternatively, consider the popularity of the Tesla toy car for kids. It’s not anything like the real Tesla in terms of functionality but is still a cool electric vehicle, especially if you already have a Tesla.
Just like the mechanical/automotive engineering behind petrol/diesel engines fascinate me more compared to electric motors on EVs. I'd still own an EV as that's the future but I'll always appreciate those mechanical gasoline powered engines. I get you analogy! :)
I never wanted a particular watch, just a nice mechanical one. I finally got one of my grandmother's inheritance money, an entry level TAG Heuer. It got refurbished twice in the last 14 odd years, I wear it daily. And it is basically my only piece of jewelry. It is also absolutely impractical when compared to a modern Garmin smart watch, the combined refurbishment costs so far could have financed a top-of-the-line Garmin. Which I'd assume is a lot more robust than the fragile mechanics. I'll never get one of those Garmins then, because a good mechanical watch is piece of art.
Getting a nice Omega (lovely watches, especially the Moon one) would feel like betrayal of my TAG.
I got hired at the Times Square store as a floor rep. I had this grandiose design in my head that I'd just sell my you-know-what off and rise to the top.
You needed to be bilingual to work there, and I had just moved to the city from a yeehaw nowhere-town, so I just claimed to be, got the job, and started hustling.
I moved watches. Like you wouldn't believe, sometimes 2-3 in an hour!
About six weeks go by, and I'm brought downstairs into the admin office area, several of the managers (there were like 7 levels of mgmt throughout the store) were waiting for me. The head lady at the time looked me dead in the eyes and spoke a whole Spanish paragraph. Of course, I had no idea, so I was speechless.
She said: "That's what I thought, furtivo." I was no longer welcome in the store, and they even made me take off my store shirt and walk to the train in my undershirt.
I didn't walk away thinking "I'll never lie again" but rather, I learned the difference between bs-ing a little, and outright lying. We all bs a little, particularly on the resume and in the interview, but I make a point not to outright lie anymore.
I visited the store nearly a decade later, and only recognized one person there, someone I had never directly interacted with. Nobody stuck around, anyhow. Hope they all moved up somehow.
I have a friend that my wife met in language school. This girl was from New York and she had an insanely good CV, best uni education from Yale, investment bank and hedge fund experience. But do you know what, she kept getting fired on the corporate gigs she took here. The trouble was, she thought lying a little is okay. Which it clearly isn't in my Northern European country. Schmoozing while a great party lubricant very easily becomes lying and that is very heavily frowned upon in most Euro places.
I'll surely heed that lesson should I ever find myself with EU compadres. That makes me wonder how it happened. How America became the lie-on-your-resume place, and how those European countries became the tell-no-lies-you-heathen countries. I wonder how long it's been that way.
I mainly stick to typical resume bs now. At my age, I don't generally have to do that bs-ing, and thankfully, I don't really have to do that much job searching. Still, I've always thought it was okay to exaggerate small things. Sat through a Hadoop workshop? Yeah, you know Hadoop. I once spent a year and a half or so in a cube next to someone who was a Powershell wizard. He'd always try and enchant me with his tricks and wizardry. I took some notes and maintained a mild interest in it. I put Powershell on my resume. As long as I don't claim too much expertise, seems counterproductive to just sniff out liars during the hiring process.
Whenever I get too old to attract good work, I'll probably just retire.
The price for a brand must be high to create value and quality does not affect demand significantly. It's only the appearance and brand image that sells.
The Swatch Group is the world’s largest watch company that owns over 10 brands. They sell mass produced brand where the value is almost 95% immaterial and non-functional (it's all in the mind of people). It's all about marketing.
Does someone remember these Panasonic cameras with Leica's red dot on them (they where slightly more expensive that the native Panasonic models, which were identical except for the red dot)?
You're paying just for the branding.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/OMEGA-x-SWATCH-Moonswatch-Mission-T...
The current aftermarket price of the Moonswatch is as high as it's ever going to be.
I didn't even spend more than 72 euro on my smartwatch (Amazfit GTS 2 Mini).. Together with the open-source gadgetbridge app (preserving privacy) smartwatches are a great option IMO.
https://mothership.sg/2022/03/omega-swatch-carousell-scalper...
This is the link I posted yesterday but somehow it did not pick up any interest [1].
[1] Low-Priced Omega Speedmaster Prompts Global Swatch Store Chaos:
Only for the initial release. Swatch has said that they'll be available from the online store at some unspecified point in the future.
edit: although I can't find that statement on their homepage any more.
I've got a few bands I rotate on it to make it feel a little more special though.
I kinda-sorta want a Hamilton with a day/date complication, but I’m not in a hurry for it.
So I went with a Garmin Instinct Solar watch that lasts nearly a month even with basic tracking. With all those smart features turned off it can theoretically run forever just with solar power. :)