Interesting little detail: The dials say “2021,” hinting at a delayed launch. I paid €250 for mine, not $3,500, so I really don’t know. Is it because it’s “Tiffany Blue?” – and the excessive use of quotation marks is warranted. You see, watch enthusiasts are often wired differently when it comes to design and functionality preferences – not to mention our remarkable tolerance towards poor value propositions in the greater scheme of things – and so, news shortly after the launch began circling that the MoonSwatch fetching the highest bids on eBay and other auctions, as well as on fixed price listings, was the Omega Swatch MoonSwatch Uranus model. Frankly, I was also expecting these to have the highest resale value for that very reason… But that’s not how it turned out. Turns out, Mercury and Moon, the two references most closely imitating the Moonwatch luxury watch by Omega, were proving to be the most popular. I spoke with some of the folks first leaving the store with Swatch bags or MoonSwatch boxes in their hands – and big smiles on their faces – to learn which references they favored. Shown here is the Mercury model, on loan from a photographer friend. Sales had already been going on for some time when one of the sales staff exited the store, stood on a chair and proclaimed: “80 watches remaining” and a short while later: “50 watches remaining!” When it is known roughly 150 watches had been received and there is a queue of well over 1,000 people, it’s easy to eyeball the difference and do the courtesy of informing the crowd of their needless efforts.
Passersby just out for a morning coffee in Vienna would often come up to us and ask “–What are you all queueing for? (…) – A watch?!“Īlthough the early opening was, as I said, appreciated, the boutique staff didn’t do much to inform the masses whether or not it will reap them any benefit whatsoever to spend their morning queueing on a square. The queue behind us grew to what I estimate to well over 1,000 people by the time boutique opened, with many of those towards the end, I suspect, queueing not even knowing what it is they are standing in line for, just there because so many other people already are. This, mind you, is still perfectly acceptable when comparing it to what reports say others have experienced in select places in Asia, as well as in London, where there were no orderly queues, just stampede by the entrance - something Swatch in hindsight (but arguably also in foresight) should have prepared for at least a little better, given the fact that people had already been camping outside their stores and given the absolutely incredible online responses.Ī retail assistant puts a ‘Store is closed’ sign in the window of the Swatch store on Carnaby Street. As this happens, the Austrian queueing discipline begins to show its cracks as people in front of us start inviting friends and relatives (who hadn’t been queueing) to join them… Which they might as well since Swatch, at the last minute, halved the per-customer allowance of the new Omega Swatch MoonSwatch to just one single piece. We all appreciate the fact that the boutique, to our surprise, opens an hour early and, with the assistance of a sufficiently strict safety guard, it begins to allow customers in – a maximum of three, if they are in a group, at a time. The first section of the queue that kept expanding with new people in a rather un-Austrian fashion.
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