On Christmas Day in 1969, Seiko unveiled a watch that cost ¥450,000. In Japan at the time, that was about the price of a mid-sized car.
It kept time to within roughly five seconds a month, better than even the best mechanical watches of the era. It was a luxury piece and a technological claim.
The Swiss were not behind. Seven years earlier, about twenty Swiss firms had pooled their efforts to build a quartz watch of their own. In 1967 they showed a prototype, the same year Seiko showed theirs. Soon after, Omega, Rolex and Patek Philippe were all selling watches built around the Swiss quartz mechanism.
So the Swiss had the technology. The playing field was level.
Then it tilted on price. Japanese makers learned to build quartz watches cheaply, and by the mid-1970s those watches undercut Swiss exports in both price and performance. The Swiss had held roughly half the world market before the decade began. Between 1970 and 1988, Swiss watch employment fell from about 90,000 to 28,000.
It’s ironic. The Swiss were at the forefront of quartz, right alongside Seiko, and still ended up playing catch-up.
The Swiss looked at quartz and saw a more accurate mechanical watch. A better version of what they already made, priced like it.
Japan, I’d say, saw something else: a watch accurate and cheap enough to wear every day. The kind that, as Timex put it, takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
My guess is that the top-end makers held on because they stuck to what they did best: handmade, mechanical, scarce. By 1997, mechanical watches made up about a tenth of what Switzerland produced and nearly half its value.
Everyone else needed a plastic quartz watch called the Swatch. It launched in 1983 with 51 parts instead of about 91, and sold more than 2.5 million in under two years. Swiss engineers built it.
They built quartz first. They learned to build it for everyone last.