I don’t know how many times I’ve found myself in a presentation where a PR makes the awkward move to show me a watch that is, horror of horrors, quartz.
In that moment, they know that I know that they know I’m not terribly interested and so we stumble over it for a few moments like Joe Biden trying to say “tech bro” before, mercy, we move on to something a bit more, well, mechanical.
For the entirety of my career in watches and at least the past quarter century, quartz has been a dirty word in a luxury watchmaking sector hell-bent on mechanisation.
The cult of mechani-cool has given mechanical watches a sort of moral superiority, and with it has come the rather lazy assertion that quartz, to put it bluntly, is crap.
I suppose I don’t mind admitting I bought into the idea. In fact, I’m still not sure I don’t. But then sometimes, like president Biden, we have to put our beliefs to one side in the interests of what we really want and what we think something bigger than us really needs.
Now is one of those times.
Because mechanical watches have a number of problems at the moment that don’t seem to be going away, chiefly that they’re too big, too expensive and too un-buyable. Quartz, and I say this despite myself, might just provide the solution.
How? Let’s start by going over some familiar ground. Since the industry’s aggressive “lower volumes, higher prices” strategy took hold in the mid-2010s, volumes of Swiss watch exports have bombed, falling from 28 million units a year in 2015 to 15.8 million in 2022, rising again slightly last year as the high-volume, low-price MoonSwatch inflated the figures.
That wasn’t so bad while values spiked and the industry recorded a series of record years.
But values have now started to tumble, too, as some of us have been saying would happen for some time if the strategy continued. Unlike heating in the winter, no one needs a luxury watch, and so as in other luxury sectors, many buyers have been turned off.
The picture is now uncomfortable. In April, RBC Capital Markets forecast that 7 per cent will be wiped from the value of Swiss watch exports this year.
Even if that leaves revenues above 2019 levels, it’s still not a trajectory the industry should or will be welcoming.
So how would quartz move the dial?
We’ve already touched on MoonSwatch, the biggest story in Swiss watchmaking in years, perhaps ever, and a product that according to Morgan Stanley’s data has helped Swatch triple its revenues in just two years. It, of course, is quartz.
It’s also not a luxury watch. But we don’t have to look far to find examples of luxury watch brands whose fortunes have been recently revived by quartz.
Cartier is the example nonpareil, revitalising its story with a cascade of battery-powered design watches, following a strategy shift introduced by current chief executive Cyrille Vigneron, whose decision to kick the brand’s wonderful but whimsical Fine Watchmaking Division into the horological hinterland has proved inspired.
TAG Heuer’s Formula 1 rebirth may have begun in reverse with a limited-edition, but when it returns as a core and no doubt highly colourful product line fuelled by quartz, we can expect it to fly, assuming LVMH can countenance making it affordable to the sort of young, passionate buyer who wants in on the design and legacy story.
The high-end houses are at it, too. Audemars Piguet’s culture-shocking Royal Oak Mini, just launched, is quartz and none the worse for it, and while it’s not often celebrated for it, Patek Philippe has been shifting barrel-loads of its quartz Twenty-4 for years.
F.P. Journe’s Elégante? Quartz. If this tells us anything, it’s that a powerful dial name – a Swiss speciality – can do quartz.
What these brands have clocked is that quartz frees them up to experiment and find new audiences. Unlike in a mechanical movement, quartz doesn’t suffer the issue of accuracy as it gets smaller, leaving designers to play with shape and proportion.
And right now, that’s useful. Because watches have entered a Rick Moranis phase, shrinking before our eyes, motivated in part by growing female interest in luxury watches and the small men’s watch trend, spearheaded by mavens of contemporary style, Timothée Chalamet, Bad Bunny and Barry Keoghan, influencers representing a generation to whom nothing matters more than the cachet brought by brand and design.
If the question is, “who cares what’s inside a watch when it looks cool?”, then the (slightly painful) answer is, “most people”.
Which means that if you’re one of the many brands that has shelled out on movement design over the past 15 years, you might be in trouble. Because your high-functioning in-house automatics don’t fit inside today’s genderless 34mm watches. Quartz, Swiss Made quartz no less, offers a ready-to-go solution.
But the biggest benefit to quartz may yet be in the cost, or at least in the price expectations of a quartz watch.
If we can agree prices are too high, then we must agree they need to come down. And yet no one in their right mind is going to risk sacrificing their brand equity by slashing prices of existing models, and nor should they.
Far better would be to introduce a new generation of quartz watches with lower price points. For all the opprobrium levelled at Bremont’s rebrand, one thing Davide Cerrato has got absolutely right is introducing a new watch that’s a good chunk cheaper than anything else in the collection.
After all the logo-whataboutery, he’s given retailers a more reasonably priced watch to offer their aspirational but belt-tightening customers. If he’d gone with quartz, and this isn’t to suggest he should have done, he could have gone lower still.
Volumes up, prices down, then? It’s a thought.
But it doesn’t mean mechanical watches no longer matter. To suggest that would be daft.
Beautiful, thrilling, desirable, sustainable, joyful, eternal – a mechanical watch is one of the most marketable products on the planet and should, must and will live on.
But with the market starting to look the other way, luxury watchmaking needs a pivot, a complementary add-on that will stimulate interest and get buyers buying again.
It could do far worse than cosy up to its old enemy.