Companies / Swatch
Company case
Swatch
Reinvention when a killer feature hits your category
Chapter 17 opens in May 2025, with an activist investor going public on Swatch Group: the stock down 75% from its peak, Omega and Longines posting double-digit sales declines since 2019, Breguet losing money. The chapter's question is whether the company that saved Swiss watchmaking once can do it again.
The first time was 1983. Quartz had made precision effortless and cheap, and Japanese digital watches were winning on the incumbents' chosen axis. Nicolas Hayek merged the two Swiss groups and answered with the Swatch: a quartz watch of just 51 parts, radically simplified, priced to win the market back from the bottom. Cost alone would not have done it. The insight was that grey LCD displays offered no room for emotion, and designers Marlyse Schmid and Bernard Muller filled that gap with Memphis-inspired colour. Graphic design became the weapon; watchmaking met fast fashion.
Tangibles argues the company's only move now is the same logic on a new axis: do not fight the smartwatch on its own terms. The axis this time is software-enabled self-expression as the basis for an ongoing revenue relationship. The chapter sets Swatch beside Nokia, which faced its own killer-feature moment in 2007 and chose complacency.
Where it appears in the book
- Chapter 17 — preview and sources
Paraphrased from Tangibles: How Software Turns Hardware into Platforms (2026). Sources for every figure are on the reference pages.
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