Swatches!
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we're just getting totally tubular here on Stuff You Should Know. You joke about the 80s, my friend, but swatches are still very, very popular. I never joke about the 80s. I'm quite serious about the 80s. That's right. We're talking about swatches. If you don't know what a swatch is, you may not be into watches.

Or fun. You may not be a Gen Xer, although, like I said, they're still around. I have recently gotten into watches for the first time in my life, really. Like, I tried to wear a watch, I remember, when I was in, like, seventh grade, because I thought it kind of looked cool. That was probably during the fake glasses period. Okay. Was it a fake watch? No, it was a real watch. Okay.

But it never really took. And I have always kind of said that I don't want things on my wrist. But I got a watch. I got a couple of watches about four months ago. I started just researching watches and how they're made. And I was really just knocked out by the craftsmanship.

And so I got a couple of watches and I the other reason was partially so I could look for the time and date without picking up my phone because I feel like that then keeps me on the phone. Right. That's a great, great idea. Yeah. So it really works. And I love my watch a lot. And today I bought a swatch. Oh, cool. Which which kind is it a newer kind? Is it vintage? Is it well, it's vintage.

It's newer, but a lot of the styles look like they did back then. It's going to be a good kind of fun summer watch. It's not too wacky, but it's blue and yellow and kind of has a big face. And it's $120, which is not nothing, but a quality watch for...

You know, a little over $100 is a really good deal these days. Swatches are super expensive. Yeah, it really is. And that's one thing about swatches is they've kept their prices down all these years.

It's about the same with inflation. Yeah. Yeah. And you could get swatches that are definitely what they sold them for back in the 80s, adjusted for inflation. They also have some that are like a little more expensive. And then I think the most expensive one, Dave helped us with this. He turned up one that was like just over $300.

And they do have some, like, collaborations with some higher-end watch companies that are more expensive than that. But if you just get a Swatch, the most you're going to spend is about $300. So, yeah. Yeah. So, Yumi and I, when we went on our honeymoon, we were walking around the mall, as you do on your honeymoon, in Hawaii. Yeah.

And we just popped in a swatch store and we got like his and her, I guess the jellyfish. Like she got pink and I got blue swatches. That's the clear one, right? Yeah. Even a watch having that level of sentimentality, I still can't just wear it. I just couldn't wear it. I can't have something on my wrist, right? But over the years, we still kind of collected some swatches here or there.

And now our collection, Chuck, includes one of those giant swatch wall clocks, an original one. Oh, I had one of those. And it's one of the coolest things we own. Yeah, I had one of those, but it was a knockoff, of course. It was a switch? Because you and I, very famously, were not allowed basically any brand name. Right. Right.

because we couldn't afford it. So I had to knock off whatever the Kmart version of that was, hanging on my wall. That's awesome. What did it look like? It looked like a swatch. That's what yours looks like, right? It's got the big band and everything. It's like hanging a big watch. Yeah. Ours is... So they built actual seven-foot-tall, with the band stretched out, wall clocks called the Maxi that were...

like giant versions of the actual kinds of swatches you could buy on your wrist. Right. And the one we have is called, I think the white Memphis style. And it's from like 1984, I think something like that. And then we went and got the actual watch to match. Did you frame it next to it? No, we just have it somewhere. So we pick it up and look at it once in a while. We're like, wow, it really looks a lot like our wall clock.

Well, I just got to say, I'm not going to try and talk you into anything, but as someone who also did not like something on their wrist, I really have gotten used to it. And it's to the point now where it feels a little weird when I don't have it on. That was fast. Yeah. And it's a good looking watch. It's kind of nice to be like an adult and have an actual watch and not an Apple watch or something. Yeah.

Right. So one other thing about swatches that drove me crazy, there's a distinct ticking sound that I couldn't not hear. And I came to find that it was actually, I guess, kind of a trait of swatches. I saw that from researching this, that swatches make a ticking sound. And it's because of the design, the very unique design they have, which it will...

We'll get to that eventually. And when we do, it's going to be eye-popping. Do you just keep waiting for 60 minutes to come on TV? Yeah, I do. And then I just bury my head under pillows until it's over. All right. Should we get into this thing? Yeah, let's. Because what's interesting to me, Chuck, is that swatches were born out of a mega crisis in Switzerland in the beginning of the 70s. Yes, absolutely. Everyone, well, maybe not everyone, if you've never watched

don't know anything about watches, you may not know that Switzerland is renowned for their watches. If you've ever heard the term "runs like a Swiss watch,"

That's not because they're cruddy and that they're they break down and that they don't keep good time. It's because they have long been a country that just has amazing craftsmanship with not only, you know, putting watches together, but manufacturing the tiny little parts and everything. That's, you know, if you've heard of Rolex and Cartier and Omega, like all these really nice watch brands, they're coming out of Switzerland and they always have been.

Yeah. And one of the reasons why they're so ridiculously high priced is that craftsmanship. Yeah. And that's just how it was. Like, if you wanted a nice watch, you bought a Swiss watch and you paid through the nose for it. And that's that was life.

Until the Japanese came along and they said, we got it. We have an idea here. The Japanese are famous, Chuck, famous for improving upon other people's inventions, just taking them and making them just amazing. And this is a really good example of that. Seiko introduced a watch called the Astron on Christmas Day, 1969. And it completely shook the watch world because the Astron was the world's first quartz watch.

And that just changed the whole game because you can make a quartz watch for very cheap and they keep much better time than a traditional movement. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. They're cheaper. They last longer. I guess there isn't the, you know, the fame that attaches itself to, you know, a Swiss watch that's made from all tiny little parts, right?

But you can't argue with quartz as an improvement. I'm hesitant to almost say it's like clearly better because, you know, a great mechanical watch is still a wonder to behold and keeps really good time. But quartz came along and it was very disruptive to the industry. We talked a little bit about quartz. What was that in? It was semi-recent. Atomic clocks. It felt even more recent than that, though, no?

No, that was pretty recent. It was only a few months ago. Oh, was it? Isn't that nuts? Yeah. It seems like a few years. And in the best way possible, by the way. But quartz oscillates at 32,768 times per second.

And when you have quartz as a part of your watch, well, not circuitry, but just as a part of your. Yeah, it is circuitry. Oh, is it? Okay, great. Then you can cut back on a lot of those other little tiny parts and you can make a thinner watch. I like beyond the fact that it just runs better and lasts longer. They can be smaller and you don't have as many tiny little parts that eventually could maybe break.

No, because in a traditional mechanical watch, when you wind it, you're adding tension to a spring, and then that spring slowly unwinds, and it drives all these gears and everything, and that's how it keeps track of the time. And that's why if you look at a traditional mechanical watch, the second hand that keeps track of the seconds goes in a sweeping motion, an unbroken sweeping motion all around the face.

the quartz watch just ticks off one second at a time. The second hand moves every second. And the reason why is because that circuitry has counted 32,768 pulses and now it's time to advance one second. So that's a huge difference. But yeah, just the

Like you were saying, like, yes, quartz is obviously better, but in the way that, like, an advancement in technology is better, that doesn't mean that the craftsmanship that it's competing with is any worse. And in some ways, it makes that craftsmanship, you know, that much more desirable down the road. Yeah, for sure. But these quartz watches came in from Japan in the 1970s after that debut in 69 that you mentioned. Well, I guess that was Christmas 69, so...

The Summer of Love. The Christmas of Love. Just a handful of days before the 70s. I think right before, oh no, I guess that was 70s into the 80s and Boogie Nights. Yeah, that was like mid to late 70s. Yeah, well, but that famous New Year's Eve scene when, what's his name, you know. Man, what a bummer. Yeah, that was a big bummer.

Anyway, quartz watches come along. They really disrupt the industry. And all of a sudden, Switzerland found itself in sort of a watch crisis. Before this broke out, before quartz came along, they controlled 50% of the whole watch market in the world. And then by 1977, a mere seven years after the debut of these Japanese quartz watches, Seiko became the largest watchmaker by revenue in the world.

And Switzerland saw their industry fall off from, I believe, between 77 and 83, from 43 percent to less than 15 percent, which is like a real, real financial crisis. Yeah, it is.

You don't even have to know what a number is to know that that's a massive financial crisis, right? And this is not just a couple of companies. This is the entire Swiss watchmaking industry, which was a huge part of the Swiss economy for centuries, right? So it was a national crisis in Switzerland. And so these companies that make up the Swiss watchmaking industry were just dropping like flies, right?

And it came down to a couple, like, really major companies that own brands like Omega and Longines and Tissot, like, just really high-end Swiss watch brands. The two companies were Alamein Schweizerische Uhren Industrie.

AG. Yeah. My apologies to our German listeners who we know are out there. And then the other one is the Societe Suisse pour l'Industrie Orlegere SA. And I said that with a weird Spanish accent, but that's in French. And these two companies were like mega companies and they were like

of Goliath's failing, falling over, essentially. They were in mid-fall. Yeah, in mid-free fall. And so what usually would happen in a case like this with these big corporations is you would take the assets that each company has, like, you know, these individual brands that they own, sell them off, hopefully make some money doing that. And then that's basically it. But a guy named Nicholas, and this is just

I love this kind of story. A guy when someone comes along and just says, no, we're not doing that. And that was a case with Nicholas G. Hayek, who, if you ask people in Switzerland, in fact, there was an actual survey of like who were the best, the best Swiss people of all time.

And they said Albert Einstein, Henri Dunant, who created the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention. And then Nicholas Hayek, who put his foot down and said, no, we're not selling these things off. We're going to merge together these two big companies and we're going to start making quartz watches.

Yeah, he was the head of a marketing consulting firm, essentially, business consulting firm. And they were like, just come in and figure out the best way to sell these companies off for parts to the highest bidder. And like you said, he said, no, I've got a much better idea. And it wasn't like they were just like, oh, OK, go do that. We don't care. We're eating Metzger Rösti over here. So who cares? Yeah.

They were very much involved in this, and he had to convince the entire Swiss watchmaking industry and all the Swiss banks that were backing the industry and that would eventually back this merger. Like,

Guys, we need to merge these two companies, like Chuck will eventually say on this podcast called Stuff You Should Know Years From Now. And we need to make our – we need to, like, start making money hand over fist really quick. And we're not going to do that with these luxury brands. We need to figure out how to make a very cheap, very Swiss watch and get it to market ASAP. Yeah, but that's the key there that you mentioned. Like, they weren't saying, hey, let's get parts from Japan, right?

and just kind of build from there. They were like, we're going to make these things in Switzerland. We're going to put our Swiss, you know, our country's name behind these, basically, which had so much pride in their, you know, watch craftsmanship. And we're going to make them all here, and that's going to be the difference. And he did not invent or design the swatch. He came up with this idea for this merger. There had been prototypes of the swatch a couple of years before, I think 1981, I

Two full years before this merger, there was one called the Popularis, which was a quartz watch. It's, you know, not my style. It was very of the time in 81, but it was thin and kind of groovy looking, don't you think? Sure, yeah.

And that was it. That was the first one. But it was not a swatch. When Hyatt took over in 83, he was like, we got to make these low end watches and we got to start making them like stylish. We want someone to be able to go out and buy a cheap watch, maybe who's never owned a watch before because they're expensive.

Luckily, he had some really good employees under his, well, employee in these two merged companies. One of them was a guy named Ernest Tomkey. He's considered one of the other fathers of Swatch. He had a couple of designers, Jacques Muller and Elmar Mock, working under him. And between these three together, you had some amazing designers, but also just really smart people.

watch engineers. And Tomkey in particular had been working for a good decade or so trying to make the world's thinnest watch. And eventually he did. It was a watch called the Delirium. It was less than two millimeters thick.

That's five sixty fourths of an inch thick. A watch with all of the movements. And it wasn't a mechanical watch. It was quartz, but it was still super duper thin even for a quartz watch. And in fact, if you watch Scarface, Tony Montana is wearing one of these. It was just a big, big deal. It was a very expensive watch just because it was so thin. And also it was Swiss. So if you put these guys who are really good at designing and really good at engineering with fewer and fewer parts and smaller and smaller spaces together,

Together, you've got the basis for creating a brand new kind of watch that Switzerland had never produced before, which is cheap, Swiss, and innovative and stylish. Yeah, it's funny. It was very of the time, like...

thin, thin, thin watches was a big thing back then. I kind of even remember that. Yeah. I feel like, and I, you know, I've done a little bit of research since I've gotten into watches a little bit, but it seems like, it seems like chunky watches are kind of the thing now. And that very sort of thin, even maybe a rectangular bezel kind of watch is, and the bezel is just the, you know, the little glass piece that sits over the top of everything to protect it.

You have been doing your research. Well, there's only a handful of watch parts and you got to know what they are. OK. But that doesn't seem to be very in as in style anymore. But they would get those parts down, you know, even for a quartz watch. I think a typical quartz watch had about 91 parts. They got that down all the way to 51. They called it within the company Revolution 51 watch.

And it was a big deal. Like it was, I mean, they're still around and still a huge company for all these reasons. Yeah. And okay. So that's going on. You've got Tom Key creating watches with fewer and fewer parts. At the same time, Elmar Mock, he had this dream to start using plastic injection molding to make watches. And rather than get approval to buy a plastic injection molding machine, which was like

half a million marks, I think, at the time. He just ordered it. And so luckily they had this plastic injection molding machine and they used it to create the first swatches. And that helped them reduce the number of movements even more because a lot of the movement parts

are what mount the actual moving parts to the watch. And what they did was they built in all of those parts that mount the movement to the watch into the case itself. So it was all one solid part. And that even further dropped the number of moving parts needed that much more in the original swatches that came out. Look at you. You said case. That's a watch part.

Oh, thanks. I thought I'd been saying like Kasi this whole time. You're finally, you're like, you finally got it, Josh. All right. Shall we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right. Let's take our first break here and when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about the early days of the swatch. We'll be right back.

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Okay, so we're back with swatches. Switzerland has this great idea, but they had a little bit of a, just sort of an early challenge on their hands. You know, they found how to reduce the parts and make everything cheaper, which was great. But they eventually looked around their factory and said,

here's the deal. We want to make these all here, but everyone here makes a ton of money. Like Switzerland just for regular old jobs has the highest, you know, some of the highest wages in the world at least and has for a long time. So, you know, they could have outsourced, they could have gotten some parts from different, you know, countries in the world and have them brought in and maybe just assembled in Switzerland. But they held firm and they said, no, we're not going to do it. We need to just innovate and

and get manufacturing technologies that are so advanced that we can get these things down to like, you know, 30 to 50 bucks. And they were able to do it.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why Hayek is so revered. Not only did he challenge the watchmakers in Switzerland to make a cheap Swiss watch, he also was like, now you have to redesign how we make watches from the ground up. And they were successful and they ended up coming up with the Swatch watch.

And as much as that is a like the innovation to the whole thing is impressive. The marketing piece to swatches was I mean, it was just as just as much a part of swatches, this new way of making watches, because Hayek was he saw watches a little differently. He was an outsider. And up to that point, if you made watches, you you considered watches jewelry, high end jewelry, essentially. Yeah.

And he was like, no, this is you're overthinking watches or at least you're overthinking this watch that we're making. These are not jewelry. We're going to make them fashion statements like fashion items. And just like, say, ties or shoes and you have more than one tie and you have more than one pair of shoes. We're going to make it so these people who are buying our watches want more than one watch. It's going to be amazing, guys.

Yeah. And they they went in. I mean, it was a huge risk. But, you know, he painted a picture of like imagine a world where teenagers want four and five of these. And all of a sudden they're, you know, over the course of a few years, they're investing, you know, two or three hundred dollars in their watch collection. And that's a good start. And, you know, it could be a second watch for people. And that was, in fact,

If you've always thought that Swatch was Swiss plus watch, you're probably right. But other people, including Hayek, have said it was actually a mashup of second watch. But, you know, they had marketing people that came in. There was a guy, a consultant named Franz Sprecher.

He supposedly coined the name Swatch, and he officially said, no, it was Swiss plus watch. Other people in the company did say second watch. So either way, you get Swatch. My money is on officially probably Swiss watch. Me too. That's what I'm going with. But who cares? It's a Swatch. Yeah. And the first 12 Swatches came out in 1983. March 1st, they debuted in Switzerland, Germany, and the U.K.,

And if you go look back at the original 12 swatches, you'd be like, those are swatches? You can tell it's got some swatch quality to it, but it just is so boring and stayed in the middle of the road as far as its design goes. And it turns out that was a deliberate decision because as they were –

about to go to market with these things, apparently everybody, including Hyatt, got cold feet and was like, what happens if this doesn't work? So they decided to go with the colors that the Swiss army uses in their uniforms. So if it was a flop, they could turn around to the Swiss army and be like, why don't you buy all these surplus watches so we can at least try to break even here? Yeah. Like you guys did great with your knives.

So imagine what you could do with a watch. Yeah. Have you seen Swiss Army Man? Yes, I have. Okay. Have you? Yes. Did you like it? I did in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy movie. The directors of everything everywhere all at once, right?

Oh, that makes sense. I didn't know that. That definitely makes sense now. Yeah, yeah. They were always sort of on the outside there with those wacky ideas. Yeah, for sure. All right. So they were selling these first ones for about 50 pounds in the U.K.,

Those 12 watches sold even though they were, people had no idea what they were in for with this watch based on these 12, but they still loved them. They sold very well. Summer of '83 comes along and they had another brilliant, you know, one of the most brilliant marketing, marketed companies of all time probably was this watch. - For sure. - But they said, "Hey, I don't even think people are saying the term drops yet." Maybe they were, I'm kind of curious when that started.

It was a great time. A shoe drop or a jersey drop or something or a hat drop. But they had a swatch drop called the Jellyfish. My brother had one of these, and I was texting him yesterday. I was like, did you have the original 1983 Jellyfish? That was the clear one. And he said he sold it a little while ago.

for a little bit of money and he said i don't think it was one of the first years and he said why is that a big deal or he didn't know it was the first year he said why was the 83 a big deal it's like well that was the first one um if i remember he got it a couple years later and you can still they still make like versions of the jellyfish now but it took off once the jellyfish hit and the idea of these drops these special releases

They would release collections in the fall and the spring and then one-off specials once a year, and they were huge.

Yeah, I think they even did seasonal specials, so a few times a year. But the fact that these were just, you know, they'd come and go pretty quickly. Like, they'd make a limited amount. It would sell out really quickly. People started collecting swatches. There was a, I can't remember, deliberate scarcity, I guess, created by the seasonal one-offs, right? And they...

That helped propel Swatch, like from Watchmaker to this is exactly what Hayek was going for. These are fashion items. They're fashion statements. They're desirable things that people can buy multiple ones of and show, you know, who they are inside by wearing something on the outside, essentially. Yeah. Ironically, maybe wearing a Swatch with your muscle shirt of the Japanese flag.

Because those were big at the time. And don't forget the headband, the matching headband. Had to have the matching headband. We played an 80s set, our band did, at the Porch Fest in our neighborhood a few years ago. And I wore like an MTV shirt and these like neon glasses and stuff. And I had the headband. I was like, geez, is that even something you can do these days? Like wear a headband of a Japanese flag? Sure. I'm not even sure if I feel good about it. But yeah.

I didn't do it in the end. Okay. Yeah, that's probably good because, you know, those hipsters will throw beer bottles at you on stage like the Blues Brothers. Yeah. Well, but we have a chicken wire protecting us, so it's fine. Luckily. I mean, you got to if you're going to wear a Japanese headband in 2023. Yeah. Let's see. Where were we? Well, I guess we can go to 85 because that's when things really changed, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so I guess the whole thing was kind of, like you said, they sold pretty well initially. And then when they started to add the one-offs, like that became like a really big deal. But 1985 was when Swatch expanded even further out. And actually, I think 84 is when they started to expand. They were kind of like the Red Bull model of like, oh, that's a crazy sport. Let's sponsor that.

Swatch looked around and was like, this is super cool and the kids are into this. Let's sponsor this or that or this. And what they came up with first was the Swatch Watch New York City Fresh Fest, which is considered the first hip hop concert tour ever. Yeah, it was Houdini.

And Curtis Blow and Run DMC, Fat Boys. I saw I think they did it for a few years because I saw where like the Beastie Boys opened up. But that had to have been like maybe second or third year. But it was a big deal. And they were on the on the leading edge of kind of everything that was cool in the early to mid 80s. So, of course, what you're going to have is people trying to get in on that.

And they had like the cheap, cheap knockoffs, like literally some of them were named MWATCH, M-W-A-T-C-H and things like that. But like legitimate brands like Guess Jeans, Guess started making watches and some other big 80s brands started getting in there on the watch scene, like clearly ripping off swatches. Yeah. One brand was Armatron's Awatch.

I don't know what that is, but I went back and looked at them and I was like, these are actually kind of cool. They were all cool. They actually pushed the envelope a little further. Like Swatch came along and like laid the groundwork for other people to go even more crazy with their watches and Omnitron was one of them. And so...

There's nothing wrong with some friendly competition. Swatch had no problems with that. What Swatch had a problem with was the counterfeits that were flooding the market about as fast as genuine Swatches were selling. Yeah, watches seem to be one of the most counterfeited markets.

sort of high-end items, and I guess in this case not as high-end, but, you know, fake Rolexes. There's always been a market for counterfeit watches, and Swatches was no different. They were selling 11,000 legitimate watches a day, a day in 1984, and they estimated that 10,000 fakes were being imported every day. Man, that's crazy. Yeah.

You said that they were kind of trying to get their fingers into every cool thing that was emerging at the time. Another thing I saw was that they sponsored the Impact skateboarding tour. Oh, yeah. Starting in 1988. That was a big one, too. And then also one of the other things Swatch became really famous for was collaborating with artists, like the hottest artists of the day.

And the big one, the one that really kind of put it all over the top, was one of the early ones in 1986. They had Keith Haring design four different watches. And they are today, I think, the most coveted swatches like ever by collectors. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they're cool looking. It's Keith Haring and it's on a watch face. So what more do you need to know? They went to Andy Warhol first and

He said, no, I don't have time for this. He said, but you should get this guy, Keith Haring. I think if you have an entire like primo collection of those four, you can get, you know, up to 100 grand for those four watches at auction.

Yeah. And the way that you tell they're primo is you take your pinky and you dab it on the watch bezel. Yeah. And stick it to your tongue or maybe your gum. And you're like, yeah, that's a primo watch, man. This is pure bezel. So they also, aside from Herring, they collaborated with a bunch of other artists. Yoko Ono. Yeah. She delivered one with a bunch of butts, naked bottoms. That's a super Yoko Ono thing to do. God love her. Picasso. Picasso.

The pig that paints. Oh, yeah. I can't believe that they didn't clean up the art that they used from him. It's just too appealing. There's no mess-ups in it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Agreed. I think they may have done that. And then Alfred Hofkunst. What would you say, Mr. Laffey? Alfred, I would probably say Hofkunst.

I'm pretty sure I said that in one of the five times I tried it. I'm sure you did.

Well, anyway, he had another legendary release in 1991. He designed three swatches that were basically food or looked like food. One is bacon and eggs. One's a disturbing looking cucumber, puffy cucumber. Another is a tomato. And then the big marketing thing they came up with for this is that in Europe, you bought them in the grocery aisles of a supermarket. That's where you could get those swatches, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I feel like you could get swatches in a lot of different places online.

Like maybe if you lived in a big enough city, you had an actual swatch store. But didn't they just sell them at like, you know, the poster head shops and places like that, too? Yeah, that was another thing, too. You could also get them at like department stores like you could get them all over the place. Right. Yeah. And.

They figured that out, I read, after they tried the traditional route, which is sending them to jewelry stores. And in the U.S., they did not catch on immediately because the main stores that they tried to sell swatches through to the United States first were jewelry stores in San Antonio, Texas. Yeah.

And they didn't sell very well. They went back to the drawing board. They're like, let's try this a different way. And then they started to sell them all over the place. And then they took off very quickly in the U.S. after that. And they're like, middle America doesn't want these. So we're going to go to the coasts. And the coast supported Swatch for a very long time until they caught on in the Midwest. They couldn't even sell their there's no basement in the Alamo Swatch there.

That's right. So you know that was trouble. Mm-hmm. I lived in the Midwest. I grew up in the Midwest, and I don't think I got my first watch until 1986 probably. My first swatch is coming in the mail in the next week. I've never owned one. Yeah, I can't wait to see that one when it arrives. Yeah. Part of it was, like I said, I didn't wear watches back then, but I don't know. I think the other thing is just like, I mean, you're lucky you got one because you kind of grew up how I did, which was like,

Hey, if it's cool and costs money, you're not getting it. Yeah. No, for sure. I did too. I wore Knights of the Round Table shirts. I've said more than once. Good for you. You got that swatch. You know, I worked myself to the bone. Yeah. Cutting lawns? What were you doing? Walking the dog, cutting lawns, taking out the trash. So you bought it yourself then? It wasn't like a Christmas gift?

No, my parents still got it for me. I didn't make that much money, but I think it's still, it were only like 30 or $40. But yeah, that was a lot of dough though. It was, but it was still most people with a job could afford a swatch. No problem. Essentially. I was just 10, you know? Yeah. I was too busy spending, you know, $8 to go to concerts and arenas when I was 12 years old for my busboy wages.

That's awesome. Wait, 12? You started working at 12? Josh, I was a busboy at a barbecue restaurant when I was 12 years old. No, I know. That's where the guy put his foot in the Brunswick stew. That's legendary. But I never caught on that it was 12. It was 12. It was totally illegal and under the table. Yeah. And what's so funny is I'm trying to imagine everyone who doesn't know the Brunswick stew story.

Wondering what in the world you're talking about. You can go listen to Restaurant Health Inspections is the story where that day. Oh, OK. Yeah. And it's popped up weirdly several times. Well, it's kind of an important story. It's funny. It just came up last night. We were watching an episode of The Bear, which, by the way, I don't like this new season. I'm not sure if you're into it or not. I couldn't get into it. I watched the first episode or two and I just it wasn't for me. Of the whole show or the new season? The.

The whole show. Oh, okay. Yeah. First two seasons? Good. I'm not liking this one. Anyway, there was a scene in the walk-in cooler where the guy's just sitting in there and I was like...

I used to love the walk-in cooler because it always gets so hot and I would be working over the dishwasher and just sweating with all that steam. And I would go in the, someone asked me to go to the walk-in to get something and I would always take twice as long just so I could be there in the coolness and watch Randy put his foot in the Brunswick stew. Man, that is so gross, dude. Like I could throw up now if I really stopped and thought about it for a while. I know. I think we need a break. All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back.

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does all that while making the process easy and intuitive. No wonder two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash S-Y-S-K 23. That's linkedin.com slash S-Y-S-K 23 to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. So Chuck, Swatch watches weren't the only things that Swatch made. If you were alive in the 80s,

And almost anything that Swatch made in the first five years was super cool. Just landed. There was the phone Swatch, which was just like the jellyfish. It was a see-through phone, so you could see all the parts. And they used very colorful parts to make the phone. One of the cooler phones of all time.

There was that Maxi swatch, the wall clock that I was talking about. Totally. This was one of my favorites. I can still almost smell one of them. The Granita di Frutta line, the Italian ice line. It smelled, right? Yeah. The pink one was raspberry, and that's the one I can remember smelling. The yellow one smelled like banana. The green one smelled like mint. How long, though? Like after being that rubber band on your...

sweaty wrist in the summertime. What did that thing smell like after a month? I mean, not good, but when you first got it, it was amazing. I can remember that smell and I can remember the smell of strawberry shortcake. Do you remember how she smelled? No, I didn't play with strawberry shortcake. For my money, one of the best smelling dolls of all time. Oh, okay.

But so anyway, not everything that Swatch put out, especially after the first few years, was a hit. There were some flops. There were some middle-of-the-road ones. And then there were some others that were like, hey, this is pretty good. Yeah, and this is mainly through the 90s. They tried to branch into, you know, like the cell phone market and stuff like that when that became a thing. I think 93 was when they teamed up with Nokia, right?

to make a swatch-looking cell phone. So, you know, that didn't sell so great. They had some other ideas that kind of came and went. Again, not selling so great. None of these were like bona fide hits, right?

The twin phone from 1989 was. It was like Memphis design and like the – it had a handset and then the base also doubled as a second handset. So you and your friend could talk on the phone to other people at the same time. Yeah, and it looked cool too. But then there was stuff like the Swatch Beat, which was from 1998, where they essentially tried to recreate how we track time by dividing the day up into 1,000 beats.

So 000 beats was midnight, 999 beats was 1159 p.m., and each beat was 86.4 seconds. And everybody said, Swatch, we've been using 60 seconds for a really long time, and we're all pretty comfortable with it. We're just going to stick with that. Yeah, exactly. Make your Swatches and make them like we love them. Although in the 90s is when they started –

They started making mechanical watches again under the Swatch banner and started making sort of higher-end stuff, watches with metal cases, partnering with some of their other luxury brands to make sort of hybrid luxury Swatches. And like you said early on, you can still –

you know, get like a $300 swatch these days. It's mechanical and metal. Yeah, which is, you know, it's cool to diversify a little bit, I guess. And those seem to be selling okay.

Yeah. And I mean, they definitely did diversify. They had a digital touchscreen watch years before the Apple Watch. Like they really have done some innovative stuff. It's just a lot of it hasn't caught on. But one thing that they kind of branched off into that I wasn't aware it was Swatch, but it was the smart car. It was a collaboration with Mercedes and smart stands for Swatch.

Swatch Mercedes art car. Who knew? Did you know that? Of course not. Nobody knows that. Yeah, but I thought that was pretty cool. It was originally going to be called the Swatchmobile.

It would have never sold, but I think it would have been a pretty cool secondary market collector's item for sure. Second car, the Scar. That's right. Hey, you know what? Scott Aukerman, friend of the show, he actually, I was on Comedy Bang Bang as a guest and he told me, I can't remember how it came up, but he told me that factoid about the Swatch car.

Oh, really? It's for Swatch, Mercedes' art car? Had no idea. Yeah, and I didn't know. This is before we had covered Swatches, so I didn't know at the time, and he wasn't sure. And I told them that if that—well, we found out it was true, and I told them that I would shout him out on the show. But yeah, if you want to check out that episode of Comedy Bang Bang, I was on it with Scott and the gang, and it was a lot of fun. Very cool. So, like we said, Swatch came along, and it saved—

The watch industry in Switzerland, so much so that all of those amazing luxury brands like Tissot and Omega and Longines, they're all owned by the Swatch group. That's how important Swatch was to the Swiss market, that it was like, yeah, it's Swatch. We're all Swatch.

And that's how you can find those brands still today. And to kind of give you an idea of how much of a hit Swatch was, in 1983, they sold 1.1 million Swatches around the world. Three years later, they were selling 12 million a year. That's pretty impressive as far as the whole thing goes. Yeah. If you want a dollar figure for the companies, when they merged, they were losing $124 million a year. Yeah.

Ten years later, after the Swatch comes along, they were posting profits of $286 million a year. And as of last year, in 2023, the Swatch Group is reporting profits of more than a billion dollars, which is amazing. What a success story. I think they're selling like...

Close to 6 million actual swatches a year still? Still, yeah. And I mean, part of that is because they release so many. There's so many swatches and people just love them and they're cheap enough. But I mean, it's still impressive however you slice it. It's incredible. There's one other fact that I love that I wanted to throw in. So because those parts were sealed into the case when the case was built or injected,

You couldn't repair a Swatch. I think you still can't. An original plastic Swatch, you couldn't repair it. And when Swatch first came out, everybody was up in arms about that. So Swatch conducted a study to figure out how long a Swatch would last, and they came up with 30 years. Not bad. Exactly. If your $40 watch is going to last you 30 years, you can shut your mouth about whether you can repair it or not. I think that was in their official press statement. That's right. You shut your mouth.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. This is a fun little trip down memory lane. I can't wait for my swatch to get here. I will post that on at Chuck the Podcaster. And I'll throw it up on the Stuff You Should Know Instagram as well. Very nice. And since Chuck mentioned that he is at Chuck the Podcaster on Instagram, that means it's time for a listener mail. Would you post the his and hers?

Sure. Yeah, I will. Now that I've talked about it, I feel bad. I'm going to start trying to wear it again. Just see what happens. Yeah.

You know what? In lieu of Listener Mail this week, we're going to do something we haven't done in a long, long time. We are here in year 17 still trying to grow this show, everybody. So this is a special call to go and rate and review us on iTunes or anywhere that you can rate and review stuff you should know. That stuff really helps us. And kind of like the old days, like tell your friends and family and coworkers like how much you enjoy the show if you do.

And that helps us out. We're still looking to grow this show after all these years and the way we did it from day one was very much organically through word of mouth. So we're asking you again for a nudge. Yeah. And thanks in advance for any nudge you can give us, everybody.

In the meantime, before you give us a nudge or while you're giving us a nudge, at any point, if you want to get in touch with us and say hi or whatever, or send us photos of your swatches, that's great. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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