They Won the Accuracy Trials

In 1967 a laboratory in Neuchâtel entered its quartz wristwatch movements in the local observatory's accuracy trials. It had not told its own board. The movements took the first ten places in the class for quartz wristwatches. They were about ten times more accurate than the best mechanical entries. europastar

I know that laboratory, because I worked in one. Mine was Aviva's Digital Garage in Hoxton Square. Its prize was Apple's App of the Week for Aviva Drive, the car insurance app I later ran as product manager. The award came before I joined, and I still keep the screenshot. I have written about what it did not measure in The Tusk Is Not the Elephant. A designer reads Neuchâtel differently after that. I do not see a country ignoring a technology. I see a small team doing the one thing it was free to do.

The laboratory was Swiss, and Swiss watch companies paid for it. europastar Among mechanical wristwatches that year, only Omega finished ahead of Seiko. Three years earlier the Japanese company's entries had placed 144th and 153rd. The observatory's managers wrote in their report for 1967 that the Japanese had improved prodigiously from one year to the next. In 1968 the wristwatch class was removed, and the number of pieces earning a certificate fell from 1,166 to 203. ssc-donze

Swiss watchmaking employed 89,000 people in 1970 and 33,000 in 1985. donze-2011 The usual account says a cheap, accurate technology arrived from Japan while the Swiss looked away. They were looking straight at it, and they won with it in 1967 and again in 1979. My claim is a designer's one. People who make things answer a threat by improving the object, because the object is what we are allowed to touch. What decided this fight was the company around the object: how the watch was made, and later how it was sold. I think that travels, and I have one industry and one job of my own to show for it.

A Wave Too Fast for Anyone

The comfortable version is that nobody could have seen it coming, and the trade told that version about itself. Michel Mamie ran the Basel watch fair in April 1982. He told the Christian Science Monitor what the trade had expected fifteen years earlier. Electronic watches might reach 15 per cent of the market by 2000. csmonitor-1982-04 A forecast that wrong is a comfort in hindsight, because it says the wave was too fast for anyone. The group that emerged prefers a version with one plastic watch at its centre. Pierre-Yves Donzé, the industry's historian, calls that the legend of the Swatch.

The correction is not mine. In March 2026 Paul Graham counted three disasters: Japanese competition, a soaring franc, and quartz as the final blow. He also noticed that Omega answered Japan by making still more accurate movements. paulgraham In June, Cedric Chin of Commoncog reread Donzé and concluded that Japan was winning on production before quartz arrived. commoncog I am building on both. Both look at the industry from above. Neither asks the question a designer would: what were the people at the bench free to change?

The Thinnest Watch in the World

On 12 January 1979 the Swiss industry held press conferences around the world to announce a watch 1.98 millimetres thick. It was called the Delirium. Eight months earlier Citizen of Japan had shown a quartz movement under a millimetre thick, in a watch that still measured 4.1 millimetres. The height of its battery and hands held it there. A later Delirium measured 0.98 millimetres complete. grailwatch

Every designer has made one of these. It is the piece built to be looked at, with one brief and one number. To hit the number, the engineers built the movement directly into the back of the case, which is a lovely idea. europastar-swatch Thinness was one of the two measures the trade had always competed on, and in 1979 Switzerland held the record. paulgraham On one careful collector's account it was also a publicity exercise that sold poorly. grailwatch

What the Trophies Were Standing On

Now the other numbers, all from Donzé's 2011 history of the Swatch Group. donze-2011 The value of Japanese watch production rose from 350 million dollars in 1970 to 2 billion in 1980. Japan grew first by mass-producing good mechanical watches, and only then by quartz. The group that owned Omega and Tissot sold 12.4 million watches in 1974 and 1.9 million in 1982. Between 1981 and 1983 the banks put more than 900 million francs into that group and its sister to keep them alive.

Omega had named this contest itself. The observatory's 1967 report records its view of the trials. Omega would not fear the Japanese in a contest that measured series production, as opposed to a few specially prepared pieces. ssc-donze Designers have a version of that sentence. The prototype has to work once, on a good day, in front of the right people. The product has to work every time, for everyone, at a price. Omega was right about the test, and the scores it kept winning were honest.

The Trophy That Became a Factory

The Delirium did save something, once it stopped being a trophy. Two engineers, Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, sketched a plastic watch built the same way, into its own back. Ernst Thomke, who ran the movement maker, saw that it could be mass-produced, and it went on sale on 1 March 1983. europastar-swatch It had 51 parts where a conventional watch had 91 or more. wipo The idea was the same and the brief was new. The first watch was drawn for a record, and the second for an assembly line.

Even then the plastic watch was not the main event. On Donzé's figures, Swatch-type exports were about 16 per cent of the group's sales in the late 1980s. The duller work counted for more. Omega offered about 1,600 models at the start of the decade and 284 in 1986, the year it returned to profit. Anyone who has pruned a component library knows that work, and knows it wins nothing. Nobody holds a press conference to announce that they have stopped making 1,300 kinds of watch.

A Prize Needs a Laboratory. A Factory System Needs an Owner.

Why keep polishing the object? This part is my reading, and Donzé does not put it this way. A designer can make the object better without asking anyone, and the 1967 entry was made without the board knowing. Changing how watches were made needed someone who could tell Omega to stop building its own movements. For decades nobody could. A cartel dating from the 1920s, given legal force in 1934, kept the trade in small and medium-sized firms and prevented large ones from forming. The law was loosened in the 1960s. donze-2018 The structure it had built was still standing, with about 1,620 watch companies in 1970. csmonitor-1990

I have been asked the question that only an owner can answer. At a quarterly review in the Garage, a senior executive asked about our motor profit. What would happen to it if a rival licensed the same scoring engine and undercut us? It was a question about price, and I answered with slides on engagement. The Swiss answer arrived as debt. On Donzé's account the banks had a restructuring committee in 1980, a consultant's reports in 1982 and a merged group in 1983. Between 1984 and 1987 Omega, Longines and Rado stopped making their own movements. I should not make this too tidy, because Thomke had been merging the movement maker's subsidiaries since 1978.

Then Japan Improved the Watch

If this were only a story about Swiss pride it would not be worth retelling. In the 1990s the positions reversed. Swiss watch exports rose from 4.9 billion dollars in 1990 to 11.5 billion in 2009, and Japanese exports fell from 2.8 billion to 0.6 billion. The Japanese makers answered with products: a solar watch in 1995, a spring drive in 1999, a radio-controlled watch in 2005. Donzé's judgement is that these had very little effect on growth.

Japan's factories were not the problem this time, so the lesson cannot be that production always decides. Hong Kong was already undercutting Japan in 1982, and the Swiss had moved to selling brands. Donzé borrows a phrase for what the Swiss group did: non-technological innovation. Both times the side that was behind made a better watch. Both times the fight was somewhere else.

"I Am No Use Anymore"

In November 1982 Margaret Studer reported from Zurich for the Christian Science Monitor. Workers had occupied a factory in Geneva and held a mass demonstration in Biel, the centre of the trade. The largest watch group had 41 per cent of its staff on short time. A woman who had worked in watches all her life, and had been dismissed, said: "I am no use anymore. No one wants me." The same report announced a new Swiss product. It was a plastic quartz watch, designed for fully automated assembly, whose moulded case was also the base its parts sat on. csmonitor-1982-11

That juxtaposition is the part I would rather leave out, because I admire the watch. Fifty-one parts is a design decision. So is a case that doubles as the chassis, and so is a range cut from 1,600 models to 284. Each is good design, and each needs fewer hands. Studer counted 46,000 jobs gone by then, and Donzé's series reaches 56,000 by 1985.

Strong Swimmers

You are a good swimmer and you are swimming well. Your stroke is long and your breathing is even. The watch on your wrist says this is the fastest you have swum all summer. When you lift your head, the towel you left on the sand is smaller than it was. So you swim harder, and look again.

The current does not care how good the stroke is. The way out is sideways, along the beach, and it costs the strength you have been spending on speed. Nothing on your wrist will tell you that.

It Was the Franc

The currency did this, and no reorganisation could have stopped it. In 1971 a dollar bought 4.12 Swiss francs, and in 1978 it bought 1.79. fred-aexszus A Swiss watch had more than doubled in price in its main market before anyone changed a single part. The yen rose too, but less, so the franc gained about 39 per cent against it in those seven years. fred-aexjpus On this reading the trophies and the model ranges are details. A trade that exported nearly everything it made was priced out, and the survivors were the ones who could charge more. Graham gives the franc a leading part. paulgraham

Most of that is right, and I cannot say how much of the collapse it explains. The same Federal Reserve annual series limits it at both ends. From 1979 to 1985 the franc fell by about a quarter against the yen. On Donzé's figures, those were the years Japan overtook Switzerland in the value of watches made. From 1985 to 1987 the franc then rose by about two thirds against the dollar, as the yen did. That is when the Swiss recovery began. The currency made the hole deeper, and it does not account for who climbed out.

After Neuchâtel

The Swiss won the trials in 1967 and named the real test that year, and bankers assembled the company able to fight it in 1983. If you make things for a living, the prize your team can win alone tells you little about a fight that needs the whole company. Ask who owns the way your product is made, before the cost reaches someone like the woman who told Studer she was no use anymore.