OPINION: It’s time for Swatch Group to come in from the cold

It’s now eight years since Swatch Group, at the behest of CEO Nick Hayek Jr., withdrew from Baselworld and, consequently, from all global watch trade fairs. With Watches and Wonders Geneva going from strength to strength in the post-Baselworld world, and with almost every major watch manufacturer on the planet in attendance, Swatch Group’s self-inflicted pariah status looks increasingly odd and unjustifiable. Leading watch writer and podcast host Robin Swithinbank explains why it’s time for the company to return to the thick of the action.

I know this is a column about watches, but it feels worth noting that almost 20 years have passed since the UK smoking ban. There are now adults walking the streets who have no memory of chugging carcinogens while eating, drinking, and dancing in enclosed public spaces, nor of that brown smell your clothes had the day after a night out. Imagine!

For nearly two decades, as those in the UK will know, smokers needing a quick cig on a night out have had to excuse themselves and head to a designated area, where they and their fellow puffing pariahs could fill their lungs unchallenged. It’s become a walk of shame of sorts, the onemade by the returning smoker.

Some, like the writer Will Storr, have argued that it’s this sense of banishment that has had the biggest influence in reducing the number of smokers in the UK. Far more than concerns for our own health, or for that of others. Passive smoking is all but a thing of the past, too, but not because smokers traded Marlboro Lights for a conscience. Instead, some sociologists believe it’s because of our in-built status competition. Leaving the table, the party, and the moment for a smoke now fuels status anxiety.

The question this invites is whether something similar has happened in watches. It’s now been eight years since a raft of angry brands left the Swiss watch shows. It was 2018 when Nick Hayek — cigar in hand, perhaps? — announced the Swatch Group could spend its money better than on taking the best seat in the house at Baselworld (Omega was the show’s town hall clock), and not long after that a good number of brands followed, Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille most prominent among them.

At Watches and Wonders Geneva this week, Audemars Piguet will return to a major Swiss watch fair for the first time since that exodus. Its chief executive Ilaria Resta has said some very reasonable and very welcome things about how important it is that AP takes part. The brand has, as she’s put it, a responsibility to contribute to the industry it’s part of and to help sustain an ecosystem from which it has benefitted over many decades. She’s right. It does. It’s the same responsibility Rolex, Patek Philippe, and countless others have never lost sight of.

Richard Mille has not yet returned. And it may not. It is an extraordinary outlier, making a fraction of Patek’s volumes while racking up similar revenues without so much as waving at a retailer from across the street. It will find buyers, whether it participates in a show or not. But that doesn’t mean it has any less responsibility. It might have more. Notching up its quarter century this year, it has stood on the shoulders of watchmaking giants, and yet now it’s one of the industry’s top rollers, it seems unwilling to be the giant for anyone else. Will that change? I hope so. But in the meantime, Richard Mille’s buyers seem unconcerned it has now taken up position away from the party.

But that doesn’t seem to be true of Swatch Group’s customers. After eight years of self-imposed exile, cordoned off from the non-smokers and their conversation, it cuts an increasingly aloof figure. Its brands were once the cornerstone not just of an industry, but a community. That community’s big moment is in Geneva this week, but Swatch Group won’t be part of it. And this is becoming a really big problem. Because it has taken itself away from that community just when watch brands desperately need to be part of it.

Now, I don’t much like the term ‘watch community.’ It’s become rather mealy, akin to Keir Starmer spouting off about ‘the national interest,’ but in the same way, the concept it describes is vital, and powerful. The watch community is a broad church, covering age, gender, geography, class, and even earnings. People in it are generally passionate (‘passionate’ — there’s another word lost to repetitive corporate auto-babble) with strong views and buyer networks ready to listen to them. Even stronger is their longing to be inside watchmaking’s ropes, part of the community. To belong to it.

This might be an odd place to reflect on how the desire to belong and to be part of something is an increasingly powerful sentiment. Be that as it may, it seems unarguable that a lack of things and places to belong to have left us lonely and isolated. Some refer to a loneliness epidemic. The watch community is the antidote to that for many, which is why brands removing themselves from it is so detrimental. Belonging isn’t everything now, but it’s a lot.

It’s also mutual. Here at another Watches and Wonders, with an expanded schedule of activity taking place in what now seems to be known as Geneva Watch Week, the prevailing sense will be that those who are here are part of a global, highly influential community; and that those who aren’t, are not.

For all but a tiny minority, being with the nots is not a good place to be. The community sets the tone. It decides who’s hot and who’s not. And I think Audemars Piguet, behind the clever rhetoric and plans to make the show about experience and brand immersion rather than new product — I’d put money on it others will soon do the same — know this, and have jumped back in before the show-lag starts to kick in. 

Swatch Group is, despite impressions to the contrary, still a profitable business. But those profits are shrinking fast and the cash cows that have kept the group in the black are showing signs of strain. There are umpteen further reasons for this linked to brand and product, but with each passing year that Swatch Group are outside the fold, that strain grows. Sure, there are too many brands exhibiting in Geneva over too large an area (the same is now true of Geneva Watch Days in September), but Swatch Group would be welcomed, or at least should be welcomed, back in with open arms. As it is, during Geneva Watch Week, it’s nowhere.

For a while, people noticed this. And cared. But as time goes by, they become fewer in number. There’s now a generation of watch gazers who’ve never known Swatch Group to be part of a show. As a result, while the community is gathering for its most important moment, Omega, Breguet, Longines, Blancpain et al are relegated to a category of brands that aren’t being talked about. Except like this.

The conversation is continuing indoors, while the smokers are outside under the awning, no longer part of what’s going on, drifting away, slowly killing themselves.