The Curious Phenomenon Of The Moonswatch

In which a brand is burned - or maybe it's built

one of these watches costs eighteen times what the other do, but why

“So what’s this line about?” The young man ahead of me turned and offered me a genuinely pitying look.

“It’s a line for the Omega Moonwatch. Swatch bought Omega and now they can make Moonwatches.” I tugged the 3-button sleeve of my Turnull&Asser shirt down in what I hoped was a casual-looking motion, because I was actually wearing a “Moonswatch” at the time.

“Like, we’re all in line for a watch? Is it a nice watch? I didn’t think Swatch was any good.” The pitying look morphed into active disdain.

“Yes, it’s a good watch. Well, some of them are good.” It was Friday afternoon and I was in a long line of remarkably diverse-looking people in New York’s Grand Central Station. A beefy-looking Arab or possibly Turkish fellow in a thoughtfully pressed $199 suit was letting one person into the store at a time. A Venezuelan woman was texting furiously with her relatives, who had heard she was in New York and were therefore demanding one of just two acceptable Moonswatch choices. Some six-foot--four Boomer man in the midtown uniform wandered past the security line, saying “I just need a battery for my Swatch.” Once in the store we could hear him asking to buy a Moonswatch instead. The Turk went in and ejected him; he joined me at the end of the line with a very put-upon sigh. His shopping bag was open and I could see two Moonswatch boxes in it.

The line was moving very slowly and I was on the verge of giving up when a young Asian fellow walked out and announced, loudly, “I GOT THE LAST ONE!” Three-quarters of the customers began to disperse. The Turk announced, by way of clarification,

“He got the last Mission To The Moon, not the last Moonswatch. They still have eight different choices in there.” But none of the departing “punters” returned upon hearing this. There are eleven Moonswatches: one for each planet, plus a consolation watch for recently-demoted Pluto, plus one “Mission To The Sun”, and the “Mission To The Moon”. This is what the Moon Moonswatch looks like, pictured next to the original Omega Speedmaster, known colloquially as the “Moonwatch”:

Most of my fellow line-standers were there for that particular model. It’s the plainest and least interesting “Moonswatch”, but it’s the one everybody wants. Except for the Neptune, which is also the one everybody wants. I’ll explain, because the implications are bigger than the mere story of a $260 authorized Omega knockoff.

A short backstory: The Swatch Group owns multiple watch brands but Omega is its flagship and is estimated to bring in about half of the company’s multi-billion-dollar profits. If Rolex was the Mercedes-Benz of Swiss watches for a long time, which is to say the most prestigious mass-market brand, Omega was BMW, or maybe Audi. Some people bought Omega because they couldn’t quite afford a Rolex, while others bought Omega because they wanted to avoid the Rolex cliche while continuing to benefit from the general Rolex virtues of bulletproof construction and general service availability.

Omega has many lovely watches — I have a De Ville Hour Vision which I think is one of the prettiest timepieces ever made — but to most people “Omega” means “Moonwatch”. The Omega Speedmaster, a manual-wind stopwatch, was the first watch worn on the moon. There was all sorts of drama around the choice, and many different tests to be passed, all of which would be child’s play for a modern $49 G-Shock DW5600 but you must remember that there was no such thing as a G-Shock at the time and quartz watches in general were still considered a risky proposition. The past is another country: people wound their watches there, and had no phones to tell them the time.

That basic and somewhat cheap-assed configuration of manual-wind Speedmaster with non-sapphire crystal and no frills is still considered a “destination watch” fifty-odd years later. I own a “Broad Arrow” Speedmaster, which was a turn-of-the-century boutique-y variant with automatic wind, sapphire crystal, and a “Co-Axial” mechanism borrowed from Swatch Group fellow-traveler Frederic Piguet. When I was younger I regret to say that I took watch ownership rather seriously and therefore I made sure that I had a Speedmaster on my wrist when I won a bunch of meaningless races including the third-ever 24 Hours Of Lemons.

There have been many Speedmaster variations, including one endorsed by Michael Schumacher at the height of his career and the wacky quartz X-33, but they have all been fairly expensive — three grand for a basic Moonwatch on the used market up to $75k or more for new gold-cased and/or limited-edition models. The Swatch Group does not protect the Omega brand as carefully as, say, Rolex does its own image, nor has it ever indulged in any artificial scarcity strategies or indulged its dealers in Ferrari-esque requirements that you own a used Omega before you buy a new one, as Rolex does, but neither have they done anything to democratize Omega ownership.

Until now.

i don’t believe any actual omega watch has ever had a logo this big on it

The Moonswatch doesn’t share anything with the Omega Moonwatch besides some approximate dimensions and the country of origin. It’s a one-ounce watch made from a combination of ceramic particles and, oddly enough, castor oil, containing a $65 ETA G10.211 quartz movement. The original Speedmaster is a 3.5-ounce steel (or heavier gold) watch containing a Lemania 2310 hand-wound movement. And while the Omega has taken plenty of abuse in the past for using a polymethyl methacrylate plastic crystal, badged “Hesalite”, the Moonswatch is even cheaper, using plain transparent acrylic. (My Broad Arrow, thankfully, has a sapphire crystal. I have an unpleasant habit of hitting my wrist on counters and doorframes.)

I was surprised that the Moonswatch didn’t use the outrageously innovative “Sistem51” Swatch automatic movement — but apparently there’s no way to make a Sistem51 stopwatch. Like all Swatches, the Moonswatch contains no user-serviceable parts beyond the battery. Once it’s broken, it’s broken for good. You can decide for yourself how much this matters to you; as the owner of more than a few mechanical Swiss watches I suspect the Moonswatch will keep working long past the time that a traditional Omega will need major service.

Here’s where things get morally and/or semantically tricky: The aforementioned G-Shock DW5600 is a dead-serious, fully-functional, highly-reliable watch for grownups. It might cost $49 but there are no real corners cut other than country of origin. (You can get a true zero corners cut Japanese plastic G-shock with a screwback case for $270 or so at Seiya Japan; I love mine.) The Moonswatch, on the other hand, is not a serious watch. It’s fashion jewelry, best understood as a tribute to the original Speedmaster. If you had to wear one watch for a year-long overseas business assignment, it probably would not be a Moonswatch.

And yet people are standing in line for hours, and even participating in riots, over Moonswatches. Why? It’s a toy, at best. Does nothing better than a standard $89 Swatch. Doesn’t hold a candle to a G-Shock in any functional aspect — and remember that G-Shock has a perfectly decent, and highly desirable, analog watch in the $99 “CasiOak”. Why do I have two of them when I already own an upscale example of the “real” Speedmaster?

Well, the Jupiter was a gift, and the Earth came from my on-a-whim decision to stand in line at Grand Central. But I’m happy to have both of them, because they are actually quite pleasant to wear. Sometimes it’s reassuring to wear a heavy battleship of a watch, the same way cattle are reassured by being squeezed in their kill chute; other times you want something less substantial. My all-steel Omega Broad Arrow is in the former category, while Moonswatches are in the latter.

wow, a whole four jewels

A quick survey of the watch-nerd sites shows that a nontrivial number of Moonswatches are bought by people who already own a luxury watch of some sort. Which speaks to the profound change in watch-wearing since the advent of the smartphone. Prior to 2012 or thereabouts, you needed a watch unless you were either lowly enough to be governed by a clock at work or exalted enough to have other people worry about the time on your behalf.

Now it’s jewelry, plain and simple. Both watches and “EDC” items are male jewelry for cultures where the wearing of traditional jewelry by men is considered odd at best and unacceptable at worst. Your humble author does not come from a family or ethnic background that would permit me to wear a $10,500 Cuban link gold chain — but nobody bats an eye at me wearing a Omega Hour Vision. In fact, there’s a whole category of $25,000 stainless-steel watches that don’t look like anything in particular, like the Audemars Royal Oak and Patek Nautilus, that are targeted at people who want to spend the price of a new car on a watch without accidentally having any 14k gold on the thing whatsoever. The target market for those watches is very WASPy and WASP-aspirational.

So a Moonswatch is, by those standards, costume jewelry. But it’s costume jewelry with a wink and a nod. Instead of wearing a fake Speedmaster and living your life in terror of someone calling you on it, you’re wearing a fake Speedmaster that is proud of being fake! It’s a secret handshake with other people who own and/or love Swiss sport watches.

If you’ve read this far, you probably fall into one of two camps regarding the $5,220 Original Moonwatch:

a) Who the heck would spend five grand on a WATCH? Are these people INSANE?

b) lollercoasters imagine wearing a standard speedy like a welfare case loser, everybody with any cash has a royal oak or at least a planet ocean

Now here’s the funny thing about the Moonswatch: it appeals to both groups. Group A might like the idea of a new Speedmaster but would never spend the money on one; that person is a buyer for the Moon and Mercury Moonswatches that look a lot like a basic Speedmaster at one-twentieth of the cost. Group B, on the other hand, digs the Moonswatch because they enjoy the wink-and-nod aspect of it; those people like the outrageously colored Sun, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune models.

Much has been made of the “aspirational luxury” aspect of the Moonswatch. It’s affordable for most people; put five dollars in a box every week and after 52 weeks you’ll have the $260 retail price. And yet it allows you to be a part of the Swiss watch hobby in a way that a Chinese-made “fashion” watch or even a nice Japanese G-Shock does not. The real question becomes: why is it aspirational in the first place? What’s so special about owning a $5200 watch? I mean, doesn’t Rolex make a million watches a year?

They do, and Omega probably makes just as many — but there are 350 million “Americans” in this country and almost eight billion people on Earth, so if you own a Rolex or Omega it’s still a rare and difficult-to-attain thing. There probably aren’t fifty million functional high-end Swiss watches in existence. One for every 160 people. You have to view it in that context. Rolex could easily sell their annual production in China alone; the appetite for Swiss watches there is de facto inexhaustible.

And that’s why the Moonswatch will continue to be rare for a while, even though Swatch has explicitly stated they will be made for a long time with no intent to curtail availability or production. The number of people who would like a “real Swiss chronograph” at $260 is considerable.

Ah, but what does the existence of the Moonswatch do to “the real thing”? Doesn’t it devalue the prestige of wearing a “real” Omega if there are a whole bunch of one-ounce “bioceramic” wannabes out there? In other words, is the Swatch group “burning” the Omega brand for a short-term bump in $260 watch volume? That’s an important question because a 14k gold Speedmaster can cost $25k new, the equivalent of a hundred Moonswatches in retail price and perhaps more than that in terms of profit per unit.

No doubt many of you remember that the arrival of the 924, followed by the product-improved 944, did a lot to take the luster of Porsche’s reputation in the United States. All of a sudden, saying you “drove a Porsche” wasn’t enough; you had to let people know it wasn’t a 944. The same was true of the “baby Benz” 190E.

(It was not true of the 3 Series Bimmer or Audi A4, which have always been the core products of their respective companies.)

The idiots at Hodinkee have been tracking used resale values of the original Moonwatch since the Moonswatch was released, and sure enough, they’re down ten percent. But wait! Rolex prices are down twenty percent! So Omega is outperforming the market. And they also are claiming that the “real” Moonwatch is disappearing from stores, with reported demand up nearly 50 percent.

This suggests that the Moonswatch is bolstering Moonwatch demand in a few ways:

• It’s increasing Moonwatch awareness, making people more desirous of a watch about which people are talking;

• It gives buyers a chance to “test drive” a Moonwatch without getting involved in one of those dipshit watch-rental schemes. (For the record, renting a watch is utterly despicable. It’s like renting jewelry. If you can’t afford something, don’t rent it just to show off.)

• It promotes brand loyalty. Someone who already owns a Moonswatch is more likely to buy the Omega original as their first “real” watch, instead of the competing Rolex, Tag, or whatever.

That third scenario always figures very strongly in the excuses given by luxury brands that go downmarket, whether it’s “Baby Benz” or IBM PCjr. The problem is that more often than not, the new low-cost product doesn’t have all the admirable qualities of “the real thing” and therefore turns off potential future customers. Some readers will recall the cheaped-out Mercedes and BMW hatchbacks of the mid-Nineties. They did more harm than good to their parent brands. (See this listing, which has my interest despite all the obvious red flags, for an example of why.)

Had Omega introduced an entry-level half-price Speedmaster, something that they could easily accomplish and remain profitable, it would do serious harm to the primary “Moonwatch” market, likely in proportion to how closely it resembled a standard Speedmaster. The more it looked like “the real thing”, the worse it would be for normal Speedmaster sales — but the less it looked like the real thing, the fewer people would want it.

The Moonswatch, by contrast, is a stroke of genius. It’s obviously different in a way that removes accusations of fakery or wanna-be-ish-ness. While nobody would bother to own a Speedmaster and a Speedmaster Cheap Edition, the same way nobody ever bothered to own an S-Class Benz and a C-Class just for kicks, the Moonswatch has real appeal to existing Omega owners.

Which leads to a final question: What other products out there could benefit from a “Moonswatch” treatment? Most of that I’ll leave to ACF commenters, but I do have a few suggestions:

• Porsche could do a $24,999 sporting two-seater with a basic four-cylinder engine and no frills — think Toyota MR2. That would go a long way towards washing the stink of Macan/Cayenne/Panamera off the firm.

• Randall should go back to licensing knives. The combination of wait time and high price is likely to make people completely forget about the brand in a few years’ time.

• Cessna could get in the ultralight or Light Sport markets. The number of people who would buy a $149,900 modern equivalent to a 142 or 152 is nontrivial.

I’m sure some of you will have much better ideas. As for me, I’m busy considering whether or not I consider my Moonswatch collection complete at two. Brother Bark has nine of the eleven, I believe, missing the Moon and the Neptune. Oh, about that: turns out the Neptune is the most valuable Moonswatch of all because the original dark blue color dye leaves a residue on clothes and skin, forcing Swatch to suspend production. So, naturally, there are now counterfeit Moonswatch Neptunes out there. A fake version of a wannabe? Clearly there are more Moonswatches in Heaven and on Earth / than are dreamt of in the Swatch Group’s philosophy. I’ll see you in line.