Issue 160: Ask Me Anything
Who buys Frederique Constant? Why didn't everyone copy the MoonSwatch? Which indies should the big groups snap up? And why is the media so unimaginative?
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is once again answering your questions. We had some great ones this week, and as a result you’re getting three or four topics that could each justify a whole newsletter to themselves. And one question about football. Thanks to everyone who wrote in; I hope I made some sense.
Someone asked me something else this week, and it’s an idea that’s reared its head before. The question was this: have you ever published an anthology or collection of your work? My answer, as it has been in the past, is that I never thought there would be sufficient demand. So I’m turning it round on you, my readers: if I put together some kind of collection of essays culled from Fourth Wheel Issues over the last three-plus years, would you read it? Would you pay for it?1
To be clear, I’m imagining some kind of reasonably good quality print product, edited and tidied up a bit to resemble coherent essays, not just a hundred-odd emails printed out and stuffed together. I’d probably include some fresh, original content to make it worth having even if you’ve religiously read every single newsletter.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Who is the market for Frederique Constant watches? - Time.The.Destroyer
Aha, Frederique Constant. You know, in September 2018 the brand took me to Paris for a party celebrating its 30th anniversary and the launch of a 30-piece limited edition skeletonised perpetual calendar tourbillon. I interviewed founder Peter Stas, a personable but almost entirely humourless - in my experience, anyway - individual, on the open top deck of a riverboat going up and down the Seine. The recording was almost entirely unusable thanks to wind noise, and anything I might have written about the brand or the watch has been lost to digital decay2.
At that time, the brand had been relatively recently acquired (in 2016) by Citizen Group and it was expected - and indeed widely reported - that Stas would be stepping down. The brand was seen as quite the success story, in commercial and horological terms. It was never loved by connoisseurs but there was a respect, grudging or otherwise, for the family of in-house movements it had created and the prices at which it could offer them.
Stas stayed on as CEO a little bit longer than you might expect, but was replaced in around 2018-19 by Niels Edderging. Stas’s last major project with the brand had been the pivot to smartwatches, and back then it seemed like that had been a pretty smart move. The Horological Smartwatch was a neat, if technologically unremarkable design, and by retaining ownership of the subsidiary company (MMT) the general perception was that Stas was right on the money.
I don’t know exactly how that panned out for him - and his wife Aletta, with whom he co-founded Frederique Constant3 - but MMT hasn’t posted any news on its website since 2020 and as we all know, both FC and its sporty sibling Alpina have done a complete 360 on the whole Swiss smartwatch idea. I forget exactly when - it may have been the final Baselworld in 2019 - but I specifically remember being told that Alpina was going to focus almost exclusively on connected watches. Today they are nowhere to be found.
At that party in 2018 there was a press presentation (yeah, it was that kind of party) with numerous slides detailing the brand’s achievements. The only one I thought worth photographing was this: a graph of annual production for Frederique Constant.
Today, Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult estimate that Frederique Constant produced 64,000 watches in 2024, at an average sale price of CHF 2,488 for a turnover of CHF 104m. So there is definitely still a strong audience for the brand, but it’s not what it used to be.
It’s no minnow, though: Morgan Stanley’s figures put it above F.P. Journe for annual turnover (although I know which I’d rather invest in) and just below Gucci and Zenith. Compared with brands of a similar volume, price and image, it is performing better than Raymond Weil (CHF 65m on 80,000 watches), better than Oris (CHF 58m, 40,000 watches) and worse than Montblanc (CHF 208m, 68,000 watches - although per Fourth Wheels previous, those figures are possibly WAY off).
It’s one brand whose sell-in and sell-out figures would be very interesting to see. The brand sells almost entirely wholesale, so there’s a good chance there’s a lot of stock out there in the world. Most high street jewellers have them, and all of them that I could see are offering quite a few discounts. These days though, that’s not unusual.
And to answer your question, that’s the audience. High street jewellers’ customers. Not to be unutterably snobbish about it - these are the same stores selling Swatch Group brands and TAG Heuer and Breitling and so on - but Frederique Constant is almost the original ‘affordable luxury’ brand, and it’s for people who want something that looks good, feels good, is good as long as you don’t look too closely, and doesn’t cost too much. I think of it a little like buying a suit from somewhere like Hawes and Curtis4. To some people it’ll always seem expensive, there’s nothing actively bad about their workmanship, but it’s done to a cost and a pro could see that a mile off. It’s not as basic as going to Moss Bros, but it’s not within a hundred yards of cool, fashionable or refined.
If you’ll permit me to go on just a little bit longer, the strike against Fred Const isn’t that it’s affordable, or even that its designs are rip-offs of classic Patek, Cartier, Blancpain and so on. The strike is that there was never anything more at the heart of the brand. It was set up in 1988 as a strictly commercial idea: can we make traditionally-styled watches for less money? The name was pulled from one each of Peter and Aletta’s grandparents respectively, and the brand attached itself to notions of traditional Genevan watchmaking history without having any real founding principles or soul beyond that. It’s watchmaking by spreadsheet, an algorithm for mainstream business. It works, to a point, and the idea of adding manufacture watchmaking on top did bestow a certain amount of credibility (Pim Koeslag, who oversaw most of the in-house watchmaking, is a really smart guy) but it still isn’t a brand identity, it’s just a more elevated version of the original proposition: the same kind of watches you find elsewhere, for less. What it, and its competitors - Baume & Mercier, Raymond Weil, Longines and so on - prove is that there will always be a market for unthreatening design and moderate pricing. But right now, I’d say that market is a tough place to be, and strength of brand (or sheer marketing budget) will win out. Wonder what we’ll be saying of the brand when its 40th anniversary rolls around in three years’ time.
If the MoonSwatch was such a financial success, why have no other groups or brands copied it? - Jeremy White
What made the MoonSwatch successful? It wasn’t about being cheap, or about the design. It wasn’t the bioceramic case either. For sure, it needed all three of those things to succeed, but they weren’t the reason. There were two things that made it a runaway hit. One, it came from brands that were already enormously well-known, and the biggest reason of all: it was a surprise.
It was as close as the watch industry - such a conservative, relatively slow-moving world - could come to a Black Swan moment. It can’t be replicated in that sense. Very few companies have all the ingredients at their disposal to even copy it like-for-like: the high-low nature of the collaboration, two global brands that despite having next to zero in common in terms of product (beyond both making watches) probably have a huge overlap in terms of existing audience, and no history of doing anything remotely similar. Omega in particular never really does collabs - that’s another big part of it.
We also don’t have to imagine what a MoonSwatch 2 would look like, because Swatch teamed up with Blancpain to create the Scuba Fifty Fathoms. It’s been well received but hasn’t had anything like the same impact culturally or commercially, partly because Blancpain isn’t Omega, but mostly because it lacked the element of surprise. (And no-one in the world knows or cares what a nudibranch is, but I digress.)
That’s not to say no-one could do anything similar post-MoonSwatch, and I actually think there are some things that would never have happened had it not been for the Omega-Swatch partnership. H. Moser and Studio Underd0g’s Passion Project, for example. I think that owes a lot to the MoonSwatch, conceptually.
TAG Heuer’s collab with Kith, to pave the way for the return of the F1, was touted as the closest MoonSwatch parallel. It was relatively affordable, but because it was still a TAG Heuer, not really in the same ball park as a Swatch, and TAG has a long history of collaborations so while it was exciting, it didn’t make anyone spill their coffee. It’s possible it was planned prior to the MoonSwatch (launching two years later, it’s marginal if you ask me) but I suspect the success of the MoonSwatch gave TAG Heuer the confidence to go ahead.
Other brands whose stock-in-trade was collaboration were able to capitalise on MoonSwatch mania - like Bamford Watch Department, whose collab with G-Shock later the same year was absolutely mobbed (to the extent that things got a bit ugly).
I don’t have hard data but I would also suspect that the success of the MoonSwatch has made it easier to launch fun, creative watches with a degree of horological credibility at the lower end of the market - Seiko x Rowing Blazers (which started in 2021, before MoonSwatch), Timex’s various collabs and revivals, not to mention its mechanical offering, and so on. But these also tap into wider, pre-existing trends.
I agree that it’s surprising not to have seen more blatant attempts to emulate the MoonSwatch phenomenon. The fashion industry made high-low collabs work for years, dating right back to the 1980s and 90s, but the difference was that the designers predominantly created original products for retailers, produced by white label factories (I believe), rather than teaming up with high street brands and co-branding the resulting efforts.
If you expand your thinking to include possible tie-ups between brands that aren’t under the same umbrella, there are lots of potential match-ups that could be fun to see - what about Audemars Piguet giving the CasiOak its official blessing? - but I struggle to think of one that makes sense for both parties. In the aftermath of the MoonSwatch launch, plenty of comment focussed on the potential brand damage to Omega; I think that was a storm in a teacup, but working with an external partner a long way below your average price point is a much bigger risk for any of the brands I could imagine having the creative inclination to try something like this.
Even if you could find one (and I am now mentally spinning two wheels of watch brands, imagining crossover watches, which might make a brilliant future newsletter), you are still copying the MoonSwatch template. The next MoonSwatch ‘moment’ will need to be something qualitatively different again - could be collaborative, could be something else entirely. The key thing is, we won’t see it coming.
Who do you think’s the next indie most likely to be bought up by a big group? - Time.The.Destroyer
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