Seiko, Swatch, and the Swiss Watch Industry (with Aled Maclean-Jones)

Uh, who are they, and why do they matter?

Uh, yeah, so I chose that year.

I suppose that period, the early nineteen eighties, was the, uh, the kind of... is seen, certainly within the Swiss watch industry, as the kind of pivotal, pivotal moment.

So, um, uh, i- it's also the, probably the moment, uh, of the Swiss watch industry's lowest ebb.

So certainly for the last sort of thirty years prior, they essentially had a dominance over the global watch market.

You know, watches me-meant Swiss.

I think this was something they assumed would, would sort of carry on forever.

Um, but obviously, what you then had happened was the, um, these sort of quartz watches, this new technology, and it's interesting, you know, a, a quartz watch, we call it a watch, but ultimately, it's a completely different technology.

The only reason they share the same, like, the, the same name is simply because they, they have, I suppose, the same function.

But, um, this whole new technology entered the market, and, um, was really spearheaded by the Japanese, and very, very quickly, as these things often do, you know, the industry went from a position of global dominance to one of quite profound weakness.

So I think it's around half of, um, half of kind of Swiss watchma-ma-- watchmaking companies went bankrupt in the years prior, and, um, and also, you know, two-thirds of jobs within the industry also ceased to exist.

Um, so I begin the, the essay in this car park in Basel, um, with these two figures, um, uh, Jacques Piaget and Jean-Claude Biver.

And these were two, uh, slight sort of renegades and mavericks who, um, uh, had just sort of bought a, a new kind of watch brand called Blancpain, and they were kind of ready to sort of lead the fight back against quartz and try and save the industry.

The problem was they didn't really have any cash, so they basically had a, I think, a borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, which is an excellent camper van by all sounds.

But, um, uh, and they were there for, um, the Basel Fair, which is, um, which was sort of, at the time, the kind of the main event of the watchmaking calendar that happened once a year in Basel, and they were there to sort of make their, uh, make their, make their big debut and sort of, you know, shake up the industry a little bit.

So hold the story there.

We're gonna come back to them.

I just want to point out two things: one, that, uh, as far as I know, Blancpain is French for white bread, uh, which means, uh, generic and uninteresting.

That is not the-

[chuckles]

-essence of that brand.

We'll, we'll come back to the brand in a little bit.

Uh, but the other thing that, that I want to point out, which you pa-- pointed out in, in passing, is-- comes from, uh, Clayton Christensen's, uh, The Innovator's Dilemma, and he makes the point that a lot of times your competitor is not a better version of what you do.

It's a radically different version.

His ex-- The classic example that I used to think about a lot, 'cause I'm a weird, strange person, is, uh, the slide rule.