STYLE Edit: Swatch’s CEO Nick Hayek Jr. on Omega x Swatch’s MoonSwatch, the collaboration that marries the Speedmaster worn on the moon with sustainable bioceramics – exclusive interview

Nov 21 , 2022

We spoke to Swatch’s CEO Nick Hayek Jr. about the exciting new MoonSwatch. Photos: Omega

The MoonSwatch, which pairs the iconic Omega Speedmaster with a sustainable Swatch chronograph, was released in March 2022 for only US$260, making it more accessible to millennial and Gen Z buyers

Swatch’s CEO Nick Hayek Jr. explains the success behind the luxury brand’s distribution strategy that left e-commerce out in the cold – even in Chinese markets

Each year, watchmakers try to outdo each other with more technical complications and higher prices, so it’s interesting to note that the most disruptive thing that has come from the Swiss watch industry this year has been a bioceramic quartz chronograph called the MoonSwatch.

The case material, while looking like plastic, is in fact a more sustainable mix of two-thirds ceramic and one-third a material derived from castor oil that Swatch Group developed.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin takes his first step onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969.

The watch in question is a marriage of the iconic Omega Speedmaster, also known as the MoonSwatch – being the first watch worn on the moon – and a Swatch chronograph, two brands at opposite ends of the horological spectrum (though both owned by the Swatch Group) that have joined together to make the ultimate in unlikely couples.

The idea for the MoonSwatch came with the Swatch Group’s development of the bioceramic. Although the initial purpose was more pragmatic – they intended to use it to make temporary pieces for Omega customers to wear when they sent their watches in for repair – it was decided that wouldn’t realise the full potential of the material. Naturally, there was also interest from other watch brands in the bioceramic.

Nick Hayek Jnr. thinks the new MoonSwatch, in collaboration with Omega, could be a second coming for the brand.

“We looked at what we could do if we gave it to the other brands but it would just be something conventional,” says Nick Hayek Jr., CEO of the Swatch Group, in an exclusive interview with STYLE. “It wouldn’t be something innovative and we really wanted to do something different with it. You had to throw everything you had been thinking about overboard and try to open your mind and think differently, but we had to try to stay within the DNA of Swatch’s positive provocation and joy of life.”

In a nod to the Speedmaster being the first watch on the moon, worn by Buzz Aldrin, the MoonSwatch collection comprises 11 models, each dedicated to an object in the solar system – the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – in corresponding hues.

The MoonSwatch Collection has 11 models named after different objects in the solar system.

This isn’t the first time Swatch – founded in 1993 by Hayek’s father, Nicolas Hayek – has turned the Swiss watch industry on its head. The colourful plastic watches are credited with saving the industry in the face of an onslaught of cheap Japanese quartz watches which saw demand for mechanical watches die off in the 1990s.