MoonSwatch: how Omega lent its legend and kept it

On 26 March 2022 people queued outside Swatch stores from Hong Kong to New York for a watch that was not a limited edition. The Omega X Swatch MoonSwatch took the shape of the Omega Speedmaster Professional, the chronograph astronauts wore on the Moon in 1969, and remade it in Bioceramic, Swatch’s mix of ceramic and castor-oil based material, in eleven colours named after the Sun, the Moon and the planets. It cost about 260 dollars. The Speedmaster Moonwatch it echoed retailed at around 7,000. Swatch sold it only in selected stores, with a limit of two per customer, and the queues became the launch campaign.

Both brands belong to the Swatch Group. By the group’s own account more than one million MoonSwatches had been sold by the end of 2022. The more surprising number concerned the original: in July 2022 Swatch Group’s chief executive, Nick Hayek, told Bloomberg that sales of the Speedmaster Moonwatch in Omega’s own stores had risen by more than 50% since the launch. In September 2023 the group repeated the format with Blancpain, putting its Fifty Fathoms diver into the same material at about 400 dollars.

A permission only Omega held

The asset Omega lent was a story nobody else can tell. NASA flight-qualified the Speedmaster in the 1960s and it went to the Moon on Apollo 11; any watch company can build a chronograph, and none can claim that history. In the books this is a reputational asset in the form of a permission: the right to say something true that competitors cannot say at any price.

Most companies that own such an asset protect it by keeping it away from cheaper contexts. The group moved it into a cheaper context on purpose, in a material and colours that no Omega boutique would sell, under a double name that made the arrangement explicit. Every buyer knew they were wearing a Swatch that carried an Omega idea.

A bridge between two price levels

The construct the method uses for this is the bridge: two offers complementary and opposite at the same time, different enough that one cannot replace the other, compatible enough to work together. The MoonSwatch and the Speedmaster sit at opposite ends of the market. One is light, playful and priced as an impulse; the other is steel, a mechanical movement and a considered purchase. Nobody shopping for the second would accept the first as a substitute, which is exactly why the first could serve as an introduction.

Read through the benefit layers, the MoonSwatch let a large public feel the emotional part of the Speedmaster (the Moon, the design, the story) at a low price. Some of those people then wanted the functional part as well, the movement and the steel, and there was only one place to get it.

The perimeter does the protecting

A move like this can destroy an icon as easily as it feeds one. What kept the Speedmaster intact was the perimeter around the operation: one product family, one material, one price band, sold through Swatch’s own stores and named as a collaboration. The borrowed value came back to its owner with interest, because the perimeter told every buyer where the original lived. Had Omega itself launched a cheaper Speedmaster under its own name, buyers would probably have read it as a discount and the reference would have blurred.

The open question is repetition. A bridge works because it is rare and clearly bounded. Each new colourway, special edition or partner brand added to the format draws on the same surprise that made the first launch work, and the Blancpain sequel showed a group testing how far the formula travels. The method’s view is that a bridge has to be maintained and renegotiated, and that the owner of the asset decides how often it can be crossed before it becomes a road.

If your company owns an asset that only it can claim, deciding where it may be used, and where it may not, is part of what we do.