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Swatch:
A Public Radio Commentary
by Bill Hammack
Listen using RealAudio
When the clock strikes midnight and a New Year begins, it's
likely you noted the New Year's arrival on a Swiss-made SWATCH
watch. To my engineer's eye, the SWATCH is an incredible watch,
which may sound odd since the SWATCH is famous for being cheap,
and mostly plastic. Here's the SWATCH story.
In the 1980s the Swiss watch industry was near collapse because
the Japanese digital watch had taken over. Deeply in debt, the
Swiss banks hired a man named Nicolas Hayek to wind down the
industry.
Hayek owned an engineering consulting firm and had advised many
companies, like BMW and Porsche, on how to make their products
better. Hayek gave the banks advice that they didn't expect: He
told them, don't shut down the Swiss Watch Industry, instead
retool it to build the world's thinnest, cheapest watch. The
banks opposed this idea, so Hayek backed the plan with his own
money.
He hired Dr. Ernst Thomke to design the new watch. Thomke had
worked as an apprentice mechanic in the watch industry, but had
left many years ago to study medicine. He hesitated to leave his
secure job and return to a dying industry, but when he saw how
much the Swiss watch industry had decayed, he rose to the
challenge.
To make a thin, cheap watch, Thomke and his engineers had to
reinvent the watch completely. Traditionally, watchmakers start
with a watch case and fill it piece by piece with parts,
repeatedly flipping over the watch to insert new items. Thomke
invented a way to make a watch in one continuous step, no
time-consuming flipping needed. He designed a series of robots
that created the plastic watch case in one swift move, embedding,
in this case, many of the watches parts. This reduced the number
of moving parts from from ninety to almost fifty, and lowered
dramatically the cost of making the watch. Thomke's production
line makes a SWATCH every three seconds - no wonder it's often
referred to as "printing" a watch. In fact, so innovative is the
process, but so simple the watch, that the patents the SWATCH
company holds today are not on the watches, but on the robotics.
A SWATCH is often cheeky in design, poking fun at the stuffiness
of traditional Swiss manufacturing. Yet, it made the Swiss,
again, the world's largest watchmakers. Over 200 million SWATCHES
have been sold since Nicolas Hayek suggested the world's
thinnest, cheapest watch. SWATCHES are so popular now that
collectors pay a premium for never opened boxes, even going so
far as to dust for finger prints.
So proud is Nicolas Hayek of this achievement, he wears at least
eight SWATCHES at a time - covering him from wrist to elbow on
each arm. And he can afford these watches. Owning SWATCH has put
him at No. 156 on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's
billionaires.
Copyright 2002 William S. Hammack Enterprises
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