Milan-Biel round trip, in less than 24 hours. The opportunity, rather rare, to meet Nick Hayek, CEO of The Swatch Group – the world’s largest Swiss watch manufacturer, which in March 2022 made a great little revolution that started from a watch, but became a global phenomenon. The story, we all know, on March 17, 2022, cryptic advertisements appeared in some newspapers with blank pages bearing the words, “It’s time to change your OMEGA… Swatch” and “It’s time to change your Swatch… OMEGA.” Social media feeds hinted at space-themed horology before the watches were unveiled on March 24. 11 Swatch watches, one for each planet that closely resembled the iconic Speedmaster Moonwatch, but battery-powered, brightly colored and made of Bioceramic, Swatch’s eco-friendly alternative. The rest as they say, is history.
But what went behind it all? How did it the iconic crossover of Omega and Swatch take place? “From a small working team, not afraid to express themselves, to propose ideas sometimes even crazy, but in full Swatch spirit,” Mr Hayek tells us while chatting at one of the large meeting rooms of the Cité du Temps, headquarters of the Swatch Group in Biel, a very bright all-wood structure designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. “The ability to keep the imagination alive, to look at the world with the eyes of a child, with curiosity, freedom, without ideology, just with inventiveness, imagination, creativity. That’s something my father taught me and that’s how it went for the MoonSwatch too,” continues Hayek, who during our chat, I cannot help but observe is wearing two Swatch watches on each wrist. “During Covid we developed and patented a new material, Bioceramic-a composite material, consisting of two-thirds zirconium oxide ceramic powder, renowned in high-end watchmaking, and one-third biosourced material derived from castor oil ed. which attracted the interest of other brands in the group, but which I wanted to keep only for Swatch. From there then came the idea ‘but what would it be like if we did a collaboration, if we tried to make a Speedmaster with that Bioceramic?’”