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In our December issue, we called the Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch the timepiece of the year. The watch, which helped customers get a diet version of Omega’s titanic Speedmaster, made an undeniable impact—but now the Swatch group reports its effect on the bottom line was just as great. Omega and Swatch sold over one million MoonSwatches in 2022, Bloomberg reports. That’s a lot of Missions to Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and the Sun. Even better: the MoonSwatch poured rocket fuel in the general Speedmaster line, too.
When the MoonSwatch was first announced, cynics predicted that the $260 bioceramic version of the watch would cheapen the value of the parent line. Wrong! In fact, the MoonSwatch has had the opposite effect on the Speedmaster, which starts at around $6,300, or roughly 25 times the value of the former. “In the wake of the MoonSwatch hype, the entire Omega Speedmaster collection, for example, the Moonwatch models, also profited from greatly increased interest,” the Swatch Group wrote in a press release this week.
What the cynics may have failed to imagine was how well the MoonSwatch would be received by most collectors. Customers continue to line up for these pieces at Swatch stores, and executives at Swatch don’t see things slowing down any time soon. “We still see potential of double-digit growth in the US,” Nick Hayek, Swatch’s CEO, told Bloomberg. And even for those who aren’t lining up appreciate the effort to establish a new generation of watch collectors. The MoonSwatch is the envy of the industry: “Their collaboration is a great idea,” François-Henry Bennahmias, the CEO of Audemars Piguet, told the Luxury Tribune last August, “which does not affect the integrity of Omega at all, contrary to what you may have heard. Why is that? Because it educates the younger generation about the icons of watchmaking.”
