Yahoo Finance Swatch, Blancpain seek 'hypewatch' mania with Fifty Fathoms collab
Swatch follows last year's MoonSwatch with new collection commemorating 70th anniversary of iconic divers watch.
Swiss watch giant Swatch Group is headed back to the well with another cross brand collab, hoping to catch fire and "hypewatch" mania yet again, following the massive success of the MoonSwatch.
This time around it’s pairing Swatch's scuba diving watch with high-end, nearly 300-year-old luxury watchmaker Blancpain and its Fifty Fathoms watch. The Fifty Fathoms diving watch is celebrating its 70th anniversary, and the collab is capitalizing on that milestone. Swatch and Blancpain are part of the massive Swatch Group’s syndicate of brands that also includes Breguet, Longines, and of course OMEGA.
Unveiled earlier this month and going on sale Sept. 9 only in Swatch retail stores (more on that later), the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms collection (dubbed "Scuba Fifty" internally at Swatch) features the Fifty Fathoms divers watch body, but this time in Swatch’s bioceramic material, which Swatch says is a hybrid mix of ceramic and a biosourced material produced from castor oil.
The collection comes in five colors and slightly different watch face designs, all denoting a different ocean — the Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Antarctic. But what’s a little different here from last year’s MoonSwatch is that Swatch is powering the watches with its Sistem51 automatic movement, as opposed to a battery-powered quartz movement. The SISTEM51 is made entirely by machine (unlike most luxury watch movements), and features 51 parts and a 90-hour power reserve.
With its added complexity and extra finishes like a clear exhibition caseback and painted internal parts, the price comes in a little higher than the MoonSwatch, at $400, a bump up from the MoonSwatch’s $260 retail.
Though it might be a little more expensive, Swatch is counting on the hype machine to push sales of another luxury watch with a pedestrian price point. Once again though, Swatch pulled out all the stops from the promotion playbook, teasing the collab via social media a week before and taking out full-page ads in major newspapers.
Last year, the novelty of Swatch’s collab with OMEGA and the MoonSwatch — which looked almost exactly like OMEGA’s most famous model, the Speedmaster Moonwatch — led to massive lines outside of Swatch stores, with fans waiting in line for days for a chance to buy one.
The MoonSwatch, like the new Scuba Fifty, could not be purchased online, meaning anyone who wanted one had to cue up at a Swatch store. On social media, lines several blocks long were spotted in major cities like Tokyo, London, and New York, leading to more frenzy, and of course the FOMO effect.
"The MoonSwatch is probably the most daring watch collaboration in history," watch expert Eric Wind of Wind Vintage told Yahoo Finance last year. "There are deeply divided opinions — some people are vehemently opposed to the idea and feel it is diluting the OMEGA brand and Speedmaster model, while others think it is one of the smartest things OMEGA has done in years."
Whether the "hypewatch" mania will happen this time around remains to be seen, but as of Friday night in the US there have been no reports of long lines either domestically or internationally. While Blancpain is a known quantity in the luxury watch world, it certainly does not have the Main Street name recognition of an OMEGA.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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