Swatches!

Published Oct 10, 2024, 9:00 AM

The story of the Swatch is super cool and one of the great retail successes. Listen in today to find out just why a country known for the finest craftsmanship started making plastic watches for the masses. 

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just getting totally tubular here on Stuff you Should Know.

You joke about the eighties, my friend, but swatches are still very, very popular.

I never joke about the eighties. I'm quite serious about the eighties.

That's right, we're talking about swatches. If you don't know what a swatch is, you may not be into watches.

Or fun.

You may not be a gen xer. Although, like I said, they're still around. I have recently gotten into watches for the first time in my life. Really, Like I tried to wear a watch. I remember when I was in like seventh grade, and because I thought it kind of looked cool. That was probably during the fake glasses period. Okay, is it a fake No, it was a real watch, but it never really took. And I've always kind of said that I don't want things on my wrist. But I got a watch. I got a couple of watches about four months ago. I started just researching watches and how they're made, and I was really just knocked out by the craftsmanship, and so I got a couple of watches, and I the other reason was partially so I could look for the time and date without picking up my phone, because I feel like that then keeps me on the phone.

That's a great, great idea.

Yeah, so it really works, and I love my watch a lot. And today I bought this swatch.

Oh cool, which which kind is it a newer kind? Is it vintage? Is it?

Well, it's it's newer, but you know, they they a lot of the styles look like they did back then. It's it's gonna be a good, like kind of fun summer watch. It's not too wacky, but it's blue and yellow and kind of has a big face. And it's one hundred and twenty bucks, which is not nothing but a quality watch for you know, a little over one hundred dollars is a really good deal. These days, watches are super expensive.

Yeah, it really is. And that's one thing about swatches is they've kept their prices down all these years.

It's about the same with inflation.

Yeah, yeah, and you could get swatches that are definitely what they sold them for back in the eighties adjusted for inflation. They also have some that are like a little more expensive, and then I think the most expensive one. Dave helped us with this. He turned up when that was like just over three hundred dollars. And they do have some like collaborations with some higher end watch companies that are more expensive than that. But if you just get a Swatch Swatch, the most you're going to spend is about three hundred bucks. So yeah, yeah, so you me and I when we went on our honeymoon, we were walking around the mall as you do on your honeymoon in Juai, and we just popped in a Swatch store and we got like his in her the I guess the jellyfish like she got pink and I got blue watches. Even that's the clear one, right yeah, even Yeah, a watch having that level of sentimentality, I still can't just wear. I just couldn't wear it. I can't have something on my wrist right. But over the years we still kind of collected some swatches here there, and now our collection Chuck includes one of those giant Swatch wall clocks in a region one of and it's one of the coolest things we own.

Yeah. I had one of those, but it was a knockoff of course it was a switch because you and I very famously were not allowed basically any brand name, right because we couldn't afford it. So I had I had a knockoff whatever, like the Kmart version of that was hanging hanging on my wall.

That's awesome. What did it look like?

It looked like a watch, you know, that's what yours looks like, right, Like it's got the big band and everything, and you just it's like hanging a big watch.

Yeah, it's ours. Is So they built like actual seven foot tall with the band stretched out wall clocks called the Maxi that were like giant versions of the actual kinds of swatches you could buy on your wrist, right, And the one we have is called I think the White Memphis Style and it's from like nineteen eighty four, I think something like that. And then we went and got the actual watch to match.

Did you frame it next to it?

No, we just have it somewhere, so we pick it up and look at it once in a while we're like, wow, it really looks a lot like our wall clock.

Well, I just got to say, I'm not going to try and talk you in anything, but as someone who also did not light something on the wrist. I really have gotten used to it, and it's to the point now where it feels a little weird when I don't have it on. That was fast, Yeah, and it's it's a good, you know, good looking watch. It's kind of nice to be like an adult and have a an actual watch and not an Apple watch or something.

Right. So, one other thing about swatches that drove me crazy. There's a distinct ticking sound that I couldn't not hear, and I came to find that it was actually, I guess, kind of a trait of swatches. I saw that from researching this that swatches make a ticking sound and it's because of the design, the very unique design they have, which it will we'll get to that eventually, and when we do, it's going to be eye popping.

Do you just keep waiting for sixty minutes to come on TV?

Yeah? I do, and then I just bury my head under pillows till it's over all. Right.

Should we get into this thing, Yeah.

Let's because what's interesting to me, Chuck, is that swatches were born out of a mega crisis in Switzerland in the beginning of the seventies.

Yes, absolutely, everyone, Well, maybe not everyone. If you've never don't know anything about watches, you may not know that Switzerland is renowned for their watches. If you've ever heard the term runs like a Swiss watch, that's not because they're kreddy and that they're they break down and that they don't keep good time. It's because they have long been a country that just has amazing craftsmanship with not only you know, putting watches together, but manufacturing the tiny little parts and everything. That's you know, if you've heard of Rolex and Cardier and Omega, like all these really nice watch brands, they're coming out of Switzerland and they always have been.

Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're so ridiculously high priced is that craftsmanship. Yeah, And that's just how it was. Like, if you wanted a nice watch, you bought a Swiss watch, and you paid through the nose for it. And that's that was life until the Japanese came along, Yes, and they said, we've got it. We have an idea here. The Japanese are famous, chuck famous for improving upon other people's inventions, just taking them and making them just amazing. And this is a really good example of that. Seiko introduced a watch called the Astron on Christmas Day in nineteen sixty nine, and it completely shook the watch world because the Astron was the world's first courts watch and that that just changed the whole the whole game, because you can make a court's watch for very cheap and they keep much better time than a traditional movement.

Yeah, I mean it's interesting. They're they're cheaper, they last longer. I guess there isn't the you know, the the fame that attaches itself to, you know, a Swiss watch that's made from all tiny little parts. But you can't argue with quartz as a as an improvement. I'm hesitant to almost say it's like clearly better, because you know, a great mechanical watch is still a wonder to behold and keeps really good time. But courts came along and it was very disruptive to the industry. We talked a little bit about court What.

Was that in it was semirismic clocks.

I felt even more recent than that, though, now, no, that.

Was pretty recently. It was only a few months ago, was and that nuts?

Yeah, it seems like a few years and in the best way possible, by the way. But quartz oscillates at thirty two thousand, seven hundred and sixty eight times per second. And when you have quartz as a part of your watch, well not circuitry, but just as a part of it circuitry, oh is it okay? Great? Then you can cut back on a lot of those other little tiny parts and you can make a thinner watch, like beyond the fact that it just runs better and lasts longer. They can be smaller and you don't have as many tiny little parts that eventually could maybe break.

No, because in a traditional mechanical watch, when you wind it, you're tensing. You're adding tension to a spring, and then that spring slowly unwinds and it drives all these gears and everything, and that's how it keeps track of the time. And that's why if you look at a traditional mechanical watch, the second hand that keeps track of the seconds goes in a sweeping motion, an unbroken sweeping motion all around the face. A courtz watch just ticks off one second at a time. The second hand moves every second, and the reason why is because that circuitry has counted thirty two, seven hundred and sixty eight pulses and now it's time to advance one second. So that's a huge difference. But yeah, just the like you were saying, like, yes, courts is obviously better, but in the way that like an advancement tech in technology is better, that doesn't mean that the craftsmanship that's competing with is any worse. And in some ways it makes that craftsmanship, you know, that much more desirable down the road.

Yeah, for sure. But these courtz watches came in from Japan in the nineteen seventies after the debut in sixty nine that you mentioned. Well, I guess that was Christmas sixty nine, so.

The Summer of Love, the Christmas of Love.

Just a handful of days before the seventies, I think right before Oh no, I guess that was seventies into the eighties and Bookie.

Nights, Yeah that was that was like mid to late seventies.

Yeah. Well, but that famous New Year's Eve scene when oh yeah that's his name. You know, man, what a bum Yeah, that's a big bummer. Anyway, courts watches come along, they really disrupt the industry, and all of a sudden, Switzerland found itself in a sort of a watch crisis. Before this broke out before courts came along, they controlled fifty percent of the whole watch market in the world. And then by nineteen seventy seven, a mere seven years after the debut of these Japanese courts watches, Seiko became the largest watchmaker by revenue in the world, and Switzerland saw their industry fall off from believe between seventy seven and eighty three, from forty three percent to less than fifteen percent, which is like a real, real financial crisis.

Yet it's you don't even have to know what a number is to know that that's a massive financial crisis, right, Yeah, And this is not just a couple of companies, This is the entire Swiss watchmaking industry, which was a huge part of the Swiss economy for centuries, right, So it was a really it was a national crisis in Switzerland. And so these companies that make up the Swiss Swiss watch making industry were just dropping like flies. And it came down to a couple like really major companies that own brands like Omiga and Long Jeans and Tissou, like just really high end Swiss watch brands. The two companies were Alamine Switzirich Urin Industry Agre, my apologies to our German listeners who we know were out there. And then the other one is the Societa Swissport Industry or leger SA, and I said that with a weird Spanish accent, but that's in French. And these two companies were like mega companies and they were like golias failing falling over. Essentially they were in midfall.

Yeah, in mid free fall. And so what usually would happen in a case like this with these big corporations as you would take the assets that each company has, like you know, these individual brands that they own, sell them off, hopefully make some money doing that, and then that's basically it. But a guy named Nicholas and this is just I love this kind of story when someone comes along and just says, no, we're not doing that. And that was the case with Nicholas G. Hyak, who if you ask people in Switzerland, in fact, there was an actual survey like who were the best the best with people of all time and they said Albert Einstein, Henri Dunant, who created the red Cross in the Geneva convention, and then Nicholas Hyak, who put his foot down and said no, we're not selling these things off. We're going to merge together these two big companies and we're going to start making courts watches.

Yeah. He was the head of a marketing consulting firm, essentially business consulting firm, and they were like, just come in and figure out the best way to sell these companies off for parts to the highest bidder, and like you said, he said, no, I've got a much better idea. And it wasn't like they were just like, oh, okay, go do that. We don't care. We're eating metzger roach tie over here, so who cares. They were very much involved in this, and he had to convince the entire Swiss watchmaking industry yeah, and all the Swiss banks that were backing the industry and that would eventually back this merger, like, guys, we need to merge these two companies, like Chuck will eventually say on this podcast called Stuff you Should Know years from now, and we need to make our we need to like start making money handover fist really quick, and we're not going to do that with these luxury brands. We need to figure out how to make a very cheap, very Swiss watch and get it to market asap.

Yeah, but that's the key there that you mentioned, Like they weren't saying, hey, let's get parts from Japan and just kind of build from there. They were like, we're going to make these things in Switzerland. We're going to put our Swiss you know, our country's name behind these basically which had so much pride in their you know, watch craftsmanship, and we're going to make them all here and that's going to be the difference. And he did not invent or design the Swatch. He came up with this idea for this merger. There had been prototypes of this Swatch a couple of years before, I think nineteen eighty one, two full years before this merger. There was one called the Popularis, which was a courts watch. It's, you know, not my style is very of the time in eighty one, but it's it was thin and kind of groovy looking, don't you think?

Sure? Yeah, And that was it.

That was the first one, but it was not a Swatch. When Hyatt took over in eighty three, he was like, we got to make these low en watches, and we got to start making them like stylish. We want someone to be able to go out and buy a cheap watch, maybe who's never owned a watch before, because they were expensive.

M Luckily, he had some really good employees under his well employee in these two merged companies. One of them was a guy named Ernest tom Key. He's considered one of the other fathers of Swatch. He had a couple of designers, Jacques Muller and Elmar Mack working under him, and between these three together you had some amazing designers but also just really smart watch engineers. And tom Ky in particular had been working for a good decade or so trying to make the world's thinnest watch. Yeah, and eventually he did. It was a watch called the Delirium. It was less than two millimeters thick, that's five sixty fourths of an inch thick, a watch with all of the movie mints. And it wasn't a mechanical watch. It was quartz, but it was still super duper thin even for a quartz watch. And in fact, if you watch Scarface Tony Montana's wearing one of these, it was just a big, big deal. It was a very expensive watch just because it was so thin, and also it was Swiss, so if you put these guys who are really good at designing and really good at engineering with fewer and fewer parts in smaller and smaller spaces together, you've got the basis for creating a brand new kind of watch that Switzerland had never produced before, which is cheap, Swiss and innovative and stylish.

Yeah, it's funny. It was very of the time, like thin, thin, thin watches was a big thing back then. I kind of even remember that. Yeah, I feel like and you know, I've done a little bit of research since I've gotten into watches a little bit, but it seems like seems like chunky watches are kind of the thing now and that very sort of thin even maybe rectangular bezel kind of watch is and the bezel is just the you know, the glass piece that sits over the top of everything to protect it.

You have been doing your research, Well.

There's only a handful of watch parts and you got to know what they are. Okay, but that doesn't seem to be very in as in style anymore. But they would get those parts down, you know, even for a courtz watch. I think a typical courts watch had about ninety one parts. They got that down all the way to fifty one. They called it within the company Revolution fifty one, and it was it was a big deal. Like it was. I mean, they're still around and still a huge company for all these reasons.

Yeah, And okay, so that's going on. You've got Tom Key creating watches with fewer and fewer parts. At the same time, Elmar Mack he had this dream to start using plastic injection molding, yeah, to make watches. And rather than get approval to buy a plastic injection molding machine, which was like half a million marks I think at the time, he dis ordered it. And so luckily they had this plastic injection molding machine and they used it to create the first watches, and that helped them reduce the number of movements even more because a lot of the movement parts are what mount the actual moving parts to the watch. And what they did was they built in all of those parts that mount the movement to the watch into the case itself, so it was all one solid part and that even further dropped the number of moving parts needed that much more in the original swatches that came out.

Look at you, you said, case, what did that's a watch part?

Oh? Thanks? I thought I'd been saying, like, Kasi this whole time, You're finally You're like, you finally got it, Jos.

All right, shall we take a break. Yeah, all right, let's take our first break here and we come back. We'll talk a little bit more about the early days of this swatch. Okay, so we're back with Swatches. Switzerland has this great idea, but they had a little bit of a just sort of an early challenge on their hands. You know. They found how to reduce the parts and make everything cheaper, which was great, but they eventually looked around their factory and said, here's the deal. We want to make these all here, but everyone here makes a ton of money. Like Switzerland just for regular old jobs has the highest, you know, some of the highest wages in the world, at least it has for a long time. So you know, they could have outsourced. They could have gotten some parts from different you know, countries in the world and have them brought in and maybe just assembled in Switzerland. But they held firm and they said, no, we're not going to do it. We need to just innovate and get manufacturing technologies that are so advanced that we can get these things down to like, you know, thirty to fifty bucks and they were able to do it.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why Hayek or Hyak is so revered. Not only did he challenge the watchmakers in Switzerland to make a cheap Swiss Swiss watch, he also was like, now you have to redesign how we make watches from the ground up. And they were successful and they ended up coming up with the Swatch. And as much as that is a like the innovation to the whole thing is impressive, the marketing piece to swatches was. I mean it was just as just as much a part of Swatch is this new way of making watches because Hyak was he saw watches a little differently. He was an outsider, and up to that point, if you made watches, you considered watches jewelry, high end jewelry essentially. Yeah, and he was like, no, this is you're overthinking watches, or at least you're overthinking this watch that we're making. These are not jewelry. We're gonna make them fashion statements, like fashion items. And just like say ties or shoes, and you have more than one tie, and you have more than one pair of shoes. We're gonna make it so these people who are buying our watches want more than one watch. It's gonna be amazing guys.

Yeah, and they went in. I mean it was a huge risk, but you know, he painted a picture of like, imagine a world where teenagers want four and five of these and all of a sudden they're you know, over the course of a few years, they're investing you know, two or three hundred dollars in their watch collection. And that's a good start, and you know, it could be a second watch for people. And that was in fact, if you've always thought this watch was Swiss plus Watch, you're probably right. But other people, including Hayek, have said it was actually a mashup of Second Watch. But you know, they had a marketing people that came in. There was a guy, a consultant named Franz Schprecher. He supposedly coined the name Swatch, and he officially said, no, it was Swiss plus Watch. Other people in the company did say second Watch. So either way you get Swatch. My money is on officially probably Swiss Watch me too.

That's what I'm going with.

But who cares. It's a Swatch.

Yeah, And The first twelve Swatches came out in nineteen eighty three March. First they debuted in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. And if you go look back at the original twelve Swatches, you'd be like, those are swatches. You can tell it's got some swatch quality to it, but it just is so boring and stayed in middle of the road as far as its design goes. And it turns out that was a deliberate decision because as they were about to go to market with these things, apparently everybody, including Hyatt, got cold feet and was like, what happens if Yeah, so they decided to go with the colors that the Swiss Army uses in their uniforms. So if it was a flop, they could turn around to the Swiss Army and be like, why don't you buy all these surplus watches? Can at least try to break even here?

Yeah? Liked you? Guys said great with your knives, so imagine what you could do with a watch.

Yeah. Have you seen Swiss Army Man?

Yes? I have?

Okay, got you? Yes?

Did you like it?

I did in a lot of ways. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a crazy movie. The directors of everything everywhere all at once.

Right, Oh, that makes sense. I didn't know that. That definitely makes sense now.

Yeah, yeah, they were always sort of on the outside there with those wacky ideas.

Yeah for sure.

All right, So they were selling these first ones for about fifty pounds in the UK, those twelve watches sold even though they were people had no idea what they were in for with this watch based on these twelve, but they still loved them. They sold very well. Summer of eighty three comes along and they had another brilliant you know, one of the most brilliant marketing marketed companies of all time probably was its Swatch. But they said, hey, I don't even think people are saying the term drops yet. Maybe they were. I'm kind of curious when that started. A shoe drop or a jersey drop or something, or a hat drop. But they had a Swatch drop called the jellyfish. My brother had one of these, and I was texting him yesterday and I was like, did you have the original nineteen eighty three jellyfish that was the clear one? And he said he sold it a little while ago for a little bit of money, and he said, I don't think it was one of the first years and he said, why is that a big deal? Or he didn't know it was the first year. He said, why was the eighty three a big deal? It's like, well, that was the first one, if I remember. He got it a couple of years later, and you can still they still make like versions of the Jellyfish now. But it took off once the Jellyfish hit and the idea of these drops, these special releases. They would release collections in the fall in the spring, and then one off specials once a year and they were huge.

Yeah. I think they even did seasonal specials, so a few times a year. But the fact that these were just you know, they'd come and go pretty quickly, like they'd make a limited amount, it would sell out really quickly. People started collecting swatches. There was a I can't remember deliberate scarcity, I guess yeah, created by the seasonal one offs, right, and that helped propel swatch like from watchmaker to this is exactly what Hayek was going for. These are fashion items, they're fashion statements. They're desirable things that people can buy multiple ones of and show you know who they are inside by wearing something on the outside.

Essentially, Yeah, ironically, maybe wearing a swatch with your muscle shirt of the Japanese flag because those were big.

Don't forget the headband, the matching headband.

I had to have the matching headband. We played an eighties set our bandit at the porch Fest in our neighborhood a few years ago, and I wore like an MTV shirt and these like Neon glasses and stuff, and I had the headband. I was like, geez, is that even something you can do these days? Like wear a headband of a Japanese flag. Certain, I'm not even sure if I feel good about it, but I didn't do it in the end.

Okay, yeah, that's probably good because you know those hipsters will throw beer bottles at you on stage, like the Blues Brothers.

Yeah, well but we have a a chicken wire protecting us, so it's fine.

Luckily. I mean, you got to if you're going to wear a Japanese headband in twenty twenty three. Yeah, let's see where were we?

Well, I guess we can go to eighty five, because that's when that's when things really change, right.

Yeah, So I guess the whole thing was kind of like you said, they started they sold pretty well initially, and then when they started to add the one offs like that, that became like a really big deal. But nineteen eighty five was when Swatch expanded even further out, and actually I think eighty four, yeah, is when they started to expand they were kind of they like the Red Bull model of like, oh, that's a crazy sport, let's let's sponsor that. Swatch looked around as like this is super cool and the kids are into this, let's sponsor this or that or this, And what they came up with first was the Swatchwatch New York City fresh Fest, which is considered the first hip hop concert tour ever.

Yeah, it was Houdini and Curtis Blow and Run, DMC fat Boys I saw. I think they did it for a few years because it saw where like the Beastie Boys opened up. But yeah, that had to have been like that maybe second or third year. But it was a big deal and they were on the leading edge of kind of everything that was cool in the early to mid eighties. So of course what you're gonna have is people trying to get in on that. And they had like the cheap, cheap knockoffs, like literally some of them were named Watch, Mwatch and things like that. But like legitimate brands like Guest Genes, Guests started making watches and some other big eighties brands started getting in there on the watch scene, like clearly ripping off swatches.

Yeah, one brand was Armitron's watch. Yeah, I don't know what that is, but I went back and looked at him, and I was like, these are actually kind of cool.

They were, They were all cool.

They actually pushed the envelope a little further, Like Swatch came along and like laid the groundwork for other people to go even more crazy with their watches, and Armitron was one of them. And so there's nothing wrong with some friendly competition. Swatch had no problems with that. What Swatch had a problem with was the counterfeit that were flooding the market. Yeah, about as fast as genuine swatches were selling.

Yeah, watches seem to be one of the most counterfeited sort of high end items, and I guess in this case not as high end, but you know, fake Rolex's. There's always been a market for counterfeit watches, and watches was no different. They were selling eleven thousand legitimate watches a day a day in nineteen eighty four, and they estimated that ten thousand fakes were being imported every day.

Man, that's crazy. Yeah, you said that. They were kind of trying to get their fingers into every cool thing that was emerging at the time. Another thing I saw was that they sponsored the Impact skateboarding tour, Oh yeah, starting in nineteen eighty eight. That was a big one too. And then also one of the other things Swatch became really famous for was collaborating with artists like the hottest artists of the day. And the big one, the one that really kind of put it all over the top, was one the early ones. In nineteen eighty six, they had Keith Haring designed four different watches, and they are today, I think, the most coveted swatches like ever by collectors.

Yeah for sure. I mean they're cool looking, it's Keith Haring and it's on a watch base, So what more do you need to know? They went to Andy Warhol first and he said, no, I don't have time for this, he said, but you should get this guy, Keith Haring. I think if you have an entire like primo collection of those four you can get, you know, up to one hundred grand for those four watches at auction.

Yeah. And the way that you tell their primo is you take your pinky and you dab it on the watch bezel, Yeah, and stick it to your tongue or maybe your gum, and you're like, yeah, it's a primo watch Man.

This is pure, pure bezel.

So they also, aside from hering, they collaborate with a bunch of other artists. Yoko Ono, Yeah, delivered one or a bunch of butts naked bottoms. That's a super yoko on a thing to do. Pigicasso, the pig that paints. I can't believe that they didn't clean up the art that they used from him. It's just too it's too appealing. It's not there's no mess ups in it, you know what I mean? Yeah, I just I think they may have done that. And then Alfred Hope hoof Kunst, hoof Kunst. What would you say, mister Laffey.

Uh, Alfred, I would probably say a half kunst.

I'm pretty sure I said that in one of the five times I tried it.

I'm sure you did well.

Anyway, he had another legendary release in nineteen ninety one, he designed three swatches that were basically food. It looked like food. One is bacon and eggs, one's a disturbing looking cucumber, puffy cucumber, and otherre's a tomato. And then the big marketing thing that came up with for this is that in Europe you bought them in the grocery aisles of a supermarket. That's where you could get those swatches, which is kind of cool.

Yeah, I feel like you could get swatches in a lot of different places, like maybe if you lived in a big enough city you had an actual swatch store, But didn't they just sell them at like, you know, the poster headshops and places like that too.

Yeah, that was another thing too. You could also get them at like department stores, Like you could get them all over the place, right, Yeah, and they figured that out, I read after they tried the traditional route, which is sending them to jewelry stores, and in the US they did not catch on immediately because they're the main stores that they tried to sell swatches through to the United States first were jewelry stores in San Antonio, Texas. Yeah, and they didn't sell very well. They went back to the drawing board, They're like, let's try this a different way, and then they started to sell them all over the place, and then they took off very quickly in the US after that, and they're like, Middle America doesn't want these, so we're going to go to the coasts. And the coasts supported Swatch for a very long time until they caught on. In the Midwest.

They couldn't even sell there. There's no basement in the Alamos watch there, it's right, So you know that was trouble.

Mm hmm. I lived in the Midwest. I grew up in the Midwest, and I don't think I got my first watch until nineteen eighty six. Probably.

You know, my first Swatch is coming in the mail in the next week. I've never owned one.

Yeah, I can't wait to see that one when it arrives.

Yeah. Part of it was it, like I said, I didn't wear watches back then, But I don't know. I think the other thing is just like, I mean, you're lucky you got one because you kind of grew up how I did, which was like, hey, if it's cool and cost money, you're not getting it.

Yeah. No, for sure, I did too. I wore Knights of the round table shirts see more than once.

But good for you got that swatch.

You know. I worked myself to the bone. Yeah, cuttlawns, were walking the dog, cutting lawns, taking out the trash.

So you bought it yourself then, it wasn't like a Christmas gift.

No, I my parents still got it for me.

Yeah.

It didn't make that much money, but I think it's still it were only like thirty or forty dollars.

But yeah, back then that was a lot of dough.

Though it was, but it was still most people with a job could afford us watch no problem. Essentially. I was just ten, you know.

Yeah, I was too busy spending you know, eight dollars to go to concerts and arenas when I was twelve years old for my bus boy wages.

That's awesome. I wait, twelve, You started working at twelve, Josh.

I was a busboy at a barbecue restaurant when I was twelve years old.

No, I know. That's where the guy put his foot in the Brunswick stew. That's legendary. Butwell I never caught on that it was twelve.

It was twelve. It was totally illegal and under the table. Uh yeah, and it's what's so funny, as I'm trying to imagine everyone who doesn't know that Brunswicks two story wondering what in the world you're talking about.

You can go listen to Restaurant Health Inspections. Is the story where that dates?

Oh okay, yeah, and it's popped up weirdly several times.

Well, it's kind of an important story.

It's funny. It just came up last night. We were watching an episode of The Bear, which, by the way, I don't like this new season. I'm not sure if you're into it or not.

I couldn't get into I watched the first episode or two, and I just it wasn't for.

Me, the whole show or the new season. The whole show okay, yeah, first two seasons good, I'm not liking this one anyway. There was a scene in the walk in cooler where the guy's just sitting in there, and I was like, oh God, I used to love the walk in cooler because it always gets so hot and I would be working over the dishwasher and just sweating with all that steam, and I would go and the someone asked me to go to the walk in to get something, and I would always take twice as longm just so I could be there in the coolness and watch Randy put his foot in the projects.

Stew Man. That is so gross, dude, Like I could throw up now if I really stopped and thought about it for a while. No, I think we need a.

Break, all right, let's take a break.

So Chuck's Swatch watches weren't the only things that Swatch made. If you were alive in the eighties, almost anything that Swatch made in the first five years was super cool. Just landed. There was the phone Swatch, which was just like the Jellyfish. It was a see through phone, so you could see all the parts and they used very colorful parts. Yeah, to make the phone one of the cooler phones of all time. There was that Maxi swatch, the wall clock that I was talking about totally, there was. This was one of my favorites. I can still almost smell one of them, the Granita de Fruda line, the Italian ice line.

It smelled right, Yeah.

The pink one was raspberry, and that's the one I can remember smelling. The yellow one smelled like banana. The green ones smelled like mint.

How long though, like after being that rubber band on your sweaty wrist in the summertime. What did that things smell like after a month?

I mean, not good, But when you first got it, it was amazing. I can remember that smell, and I can remember the smell of Strawberry Shortcake. Do you remember how she smelled?

No, I didn't play with Strawberry Shortcake.

For my money, one of the best smelling dolls of all time. Okay, but so anyway, not everything that Swatch put out, especially after the first few years, was a hit. There were some flops. There were some middle of the road ones, and then there were some others that were like it's pretty good.

Yeah, And this is mainly through the nineties. They tried to branch into, you know, like the cell phone market and stuff like that, when that became a thing. I think ninety three was when they teamed up with Nokia to make a Swatch looking cell phone. So you know, that didn't sell so great. They had some other ideas that kind of came and went again not selling so great. None of these were like bona fide hits, right.

The twin phone from nineteen eighty nine was it was like Memphis design and like the they had a handset, and then the base also doubled as a second handset, so yeah, the frame could talk on the phone other people at the same time. Yeah, and it looked cool too. But then there was stuff like the Swatch Beat, which was from nineteen ninety eight, where they essentially tried to recreate how we track time by dividing the day up into one thousand beats. So zero zero zero beats was midnight, nine nine nine beats was eleven to fifty nine PM, and each beat was eighty six point four seconds, And everybody said, Swatch, Yeah, we've been using sixty seconds for a really long time, and we're all pretty comfortable with it. We're just gonna stick with that.

Yeah, exactly, make your swatches and make them like we love them. Although in the nineties is when they started they started making mechanical watches again under this Swatch banner and started making sort of higher end stuff watches with metal cases, partnering with some of their other you know, luxury brands to make you know, sort of hybrid luxury swatches. And like you said early on, you can still you know, get like a three hundred dollars swatch these days, it's mechanical and metal, Yeah, which is you know, it's cool to diverse fy a little bit, I guess, and that those seem to be selling, okay.

Yeah, And I mean they definitely did diverse Fy. They had a digital touch screen watch years before the Apple Watch. Like, they really have done some innovative stuff. It's just a lot of it hasn't caught on. But one that one thing that they kind of branched off into that I wasn't aware it was Swatch, but it was the smart car. It was a collaboration with Mercedes Smart stands for Swatch Mercedes Art car. Who did you know that?

Of course not nobody knows that.

Yeah, but I thought that was pretty cool. It was originally going to be called the Swatchmobile. It would have never sold, but I think it would have been a pretty cool secondary market collector's item for sure.

Second car, the car that's right. Hey, you know what Scott Ackerman, friend of the show. He actually I was on Comedy Bang Bang as a guest and he told me. I can't remember how it came up, but he told me that factoid about this Swatch car.

Oh really, it's good for Swatch Mercedes Art Car had no idea.

Yeah, and I didn't know. This is before we had covered swatches, so I didn't know at the time and he wasn't sure. And I told them that if that, well, we found out it was true, and I told him that I would shout him out on the show. But yeah, if you want to check out that episode of Comedy Bang Bang, I was on it with Scott in the Gang and it.

Was a lot of fun, very cool. So, like we said, Swatch came along and they it saved the watch industry in Switzerland so much so that all of those amazing luxury brands like Tissow and Umiga and Long Jeans, they're all owned by the Swatch group. That's how that's how important Swatch was to the Swiss market. That it was like, yeah, it's Swatch, We're all Swatched and that's how you can find those brands still today. And to kind of give you an idea of how much of a hit Swatch was. In nineteen eighty three, they sold one point one million swatches around the world. Three years later they were selling twelve million a year. That's pretty impressive as far as the whole thing goes.

Yeah, if you want a dollar figure for the companies. When they merged, they were losing one hundred and twenty four million dollars a year. Ten years later, after this watch comes along, they were posting profits of two hundred and eighty six million dollars a year, and as of last year in twenty twenty three, the Swatch Group is reporting profits of more than a billion dollars, which is amazing. What a success story. I think they're selling like close to six million actual swatches a year still.

Still yeah, And I mean part of that is because they release so many there's so many swatches and people just love them and they're cheap enough. But I mean that's still impressive. However you slice it, it's incredible. There's one other fact that I love that I wanted to throw in, so because those parts were sealed into the case when the case was built or injected, you couldn't repair a swatch. I think you still can't. An original plastic swatch, you couldn't repair it. And when Swatch first came out, everybody was up in arms about that. So Swatch conducted a study to figure out how long a swatch would last, and they came up with thirty years so if you're exactly if your forty dollars watch is going to last you thirty years, you can shut your mouth about whether you can repair it or not. I think that was in their official press statement.

That's right, you shut your mouth.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else. This is a fun little trip down memory lane. I can't wait for my swatch to get here. I will post that on at Chuck the Podcaster, and I'll throw it up on this stuff. You should know Instagram as well.

Very nice And since Chuck mentioned that he is at Chuck the Podcast on Instagram, that means it's time for a listener mail.

Would you post the his and hers?

Sure? Yeah, Well, now that I've talked about it, I feel bad, I'm going to start trying to wear it again.

See what happens. Yeah, you know what, in lou of listener Mail this week, we're gonna do something we haven't done in a long long time. We are here in your seventeen still trying to grow this show. Everybody. So this is a special call to go and rate and review us on iTunes or anywhere that you can rate and review stuff. You should know that stuff really helps us and kind of like the old day's like tell tell your friends and family and coworkers like how much you enjoy the show if you do, and that helps us out. We're still looking to grow this show after all these years, and the way we did it from day one was very much organically through word of mouth. So we're asking you again for a nudge.

Yeah, thanks in advance for any nudge you can give us. Everybody in the meantime before you give us a nudge, or while you're giving us a nudge at any point, if you want to get in touch with us and say hi or whatever you or send us photos of your swatches, that's great. You can send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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