This story is taken from Esquire's About Time newsletter, style director Johnny Davis’s straight-talking take on the wonderful world of watches. Sign up here.
It is 8.10 in the morning, and they’ve been here for hours.
The queue is three-deep and snakes the length of one of Covent Garden’s historic streets. The young, fashionably dressed crowd wait anxiously in line, or sit chatting on the pavement – stretching and doing each other’s make-up. Excitement is in the air.
Meanwhile, across the street from the open audition at Pineapple Dance Studios, there is another queue. Older, less obviously up on the latest sportswear trends and, frankly, about 95 per cent more male, it is the line for the latest watch release from Omega x Swatch.
Two years to the day after the two brands unveiled their record-breaking joint-venture – a plastic Bioceramic version of Omega’s classic Speedmaster that has now been produced in 22 iterations, inspired six Blancpain versions and tripled Swatch’s turnover from CHF 214 million [£188m] to CHF 660 million [£585m] – a new MoonSwatch was in town.
The all-white Mission To The Moonphase was notable for a couple of reasons. First, it was the only Swatch chronograph in its 41-year history to feature a moonphase, the function that shows different phases of the moon through a small hole on the dial.
Second, it had Snoopy on the dial.
The rise in cartoon – I’m sorry, character – watches over the last few years has been quite something. No longer the preserve of Year 3 playgrounds, serious horology-heads may now take their pick from a Franck Muller x Bamford Watch Department model with Popeye on the dial, a lime green Oris featuring Kermit the Frog popping up in the date window once a month or a Tag Heuer smartwatch with Mario racing along in his Kart (“It’s Mario Time!”) – and not be thrown out of Watch Club.
More importantly, Snoopy has a special place in watch lore. The Peanuts’ beagle has been Nasa’s mascot since the 1960s. He has been used in an internal safety campaign and to illustrate astronauts’ instruction books. A lunar lander was named for him, so was a crater on the moon.
There exists such a thing as the Silver Snoopy Award, considered the American space agency’s highest honour. According to Nasa a ‘Silver Snoopy Award is given personally by Nasa astronauts to Nasa employees and contractors for outstanding achievements related to human flight safety or mission success’.
Some 15,000 Silver Snoopys have been proudly pinned onto Nasa's most-deserving employees since 1968.
Omega famously kitted out astronauts including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with Speedmaster Professional chronographs, and various special editions of the ‘Moonwatch’ have featured Snoopy on their dials, triggering long waiting lists for Omega-heads and commanding top dollar on resale.
The initial Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch launch in March 2022 was a big one.
Unavailable online and purposefully limited to physical Swatch shops – and only certain ones around the world at that – the obvious intention was to get eyes back on a brand that had perhaps lost a little of its shine.
It worked.
In some locations riot police were dispatched and shops were forced to shut. Some people suggested Swatch hadn’t thought the idea through properly. Others pointed out it wasn’t a bad way to get a load of free publicity.
“It was crazy,” Nick Hayek Jr, CEO of the Swatch Group, owners of both Swatch and Omega, recalled. “We clearly communicated from the beginning: it’s not a limited edition.”
But no one was listening to that. Resale prices on StockX got completely out of hand, while a suitcase containing 11 models of the special editions – they were still plastic watches! – sold at Sotheby’s in February for CHF 534,670 (£467,745), with the money going to an Omega-backed charity.
After 28 versions in 24 months, it was perhaps understandable that a certain ennui has set in around the whole MoonSwatch caper.
Debate has swung back and forth over whether the exercise has been good or bad for ‘the hobby’ of watches. If the comments section of Swatch’s Instagram can sometimes make for painful reading on the subject, Mr Heyek can probably live with that.
This story is taken from Esquire's About Time newsletter, style director Johnny Davis’s straight-talking take on the wonderful world of watches. Sign up here.
The idea was indisputably the single greatest watchworld marketing event this decade, something that will surely be taught in business schools for years to come.
A Snoopy version seemed like a good bet to check if there was still fuel left in the rocket.
And Swatch went for it – teasing Snoopy cartoons on its social media back in January and taking out whimsical full-page ads in the broadsheet press featuring paw prints on the moon’s surface.
Some hardcore Omega fans, of which there are many, suggested this was an IP raid too far – Snoopy might be an amusing cartoon dog but he wasn’t a joke.
His likeness was used to recognise the very bravest men and women within an organisation that Omega had deep and profound roots with.
But by and large the comments on Swatch’s IG turned from 😡 to 😀.
Snoopy was one the one to get behind.
The flippers certainly thought so. The day it was announced, and before anyone outside a select few inside Swatch had actually seen one, the £270 watch was listed on eBay for £5,000.
So I decided to see how easy it would be to get one on launch day.
Would the riot police still be standing by? Or had things died down to the point that you could stroll into a Swatch store and pick one up?
I live in London, and there were three Swatch shops due to stock the Mission To The Moonphase – Oxford Street, Carnaby Street and Covent Garden.
It launched at 10am on Tuesday 26th.
At 4pm on Monday I went on a recce. Oxford Street seemed to be the place to start, but where previous launches had seen evidence of fold-up chairs, rolled-up sleeping bags and wrapped-up punters preparing for a night queuing ahead of the next morning's opening, the pavement outside was deserted.
So, I went in and asked. Were they getting the Snoopy in tomorrow?
“Maybe!” said the assistant, brightly.
It’s just that I was expecting queues…
“Yeah, we thought there might be. But they’re not letting anyone stay outside the store. They are people outside other stores, though.”
Fifteen minutes away on Carnaby Street, though, there wasn’t any evidence of it.
I asked again. I was expecting queues!
“I think we all were,” said the assistant, a bit glumly. “But it doesn’t look like it.”
At Covent Garden things looked more hopeful – one guy on a fold-down chair, with two more waiting.
How long had the man at the front been there?
“Two days,” he said.
What?
“I’ve been first at every launch,” he said, referring to the various MoonSwatch and Blancpain releases that had come before.
And what time would be recommended I get down here tomorrow morning, to be in with a shout? Eight o’clock?
“Eight o’clock! You ain’t gonna get a watch at eight o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Not gonna happen. Not in a million years.”
Based on his experience, he said the queue would really start to pick up once work had finished and get “heavy” around midnight.
“I wouldn’t come later than 5 o’clock."
My new friend was wearing a Hublot-branded jacket, so I asked if he was a watch fan. The answer turned out to be yes and no. A fortnight ago he’d been first through the door at the Omega boutique in Geneva and picked up the extremely tasty new white-dialled (real) Speedmaster, the day it came out. But he’d bought it to flip it.
“Bought it in Swiss money, and got the tax back at the airport,” he said. “So, it cost me 6/7 rather than 7/7 [ie: £6,700 not £7,700].”
As for MoonSwatches, he’d given his collection to his son. Tomorrow’s Snoopy one, though, was already sold.
“Done deal,” he said. “£1,270.”
Well, I guess that was worth his time.
“It’s not!” he spluttered. “It’s three days.”
He thought about it.
“Really, I should keep this. This is a keeper, really. ‘Cos the Snoopy – and there’s only one. The others were range of watches. This is one watch.”
He said he’d seen the FedEx man drop off earlier and claimed he’d given him the indication, via some complicated finger gestures, that he’d got 150 watches with him – the stock for the store.
I wasn’t sure how likely it was the FedEx man would know the precise contents of his packages, or how much the Hublot jacket man knew about anything, really. So I said I might see him later.
“Wrap up,” he said. “It’s fucking freezing!”
I did the same circuit again just before midnight. By now there was a small queue down the side of the Oxford Street store – about 35 people.
The guy at the front said they had been allowed to queue from 9pm. He was in good spirits and wearing last year’s Swatch x Omega Mission To Moonshine Gold edition. He was a fan, not a flipper.
“One hundred per cent I’m going to keep it,” he said.
Over at Carnaby Street it was hard to make out if there was a queue or not – or just a group of half-a-dozen guys, standing around.
A security man was on hand, too.
“What was crazy was Oxford Street last year,” he said. “Where we had to use barriers to keep people in line. And we set a cut-off point [after which we knew we’d have run out of stock]. They weren’t happy. You have to let people know as soon as you get that information. People have got things to do.
“This one is more low-key.”
He told me I was seventh in the queue and offered to keep my place for me. I made my excuses and left.
Carnaby Street was filling up.
Hublot jacket-man was asleep in his fold-up chair, so I got talking to a young couple from Brixton. (It was indeed getting ‘fucking freezing’, and as we spoke they reached into their overnight bag, ripped opened a multipack of Christmas socks and used them as gloves.)
On the question of whether the MoonSwatch hype had cooled, they had an interesting take.
“I think a lot of people are poor right now and no one realises it,” one of them said. “The economy’s absolutely fucked. People used to spend their money of frivolous things. Now they just can’t.”
Whether you consider a Snoopy watch – or any watch – to be frivolous is up for debate. Either way, these guys were keeping theirs. (They were wearing matching Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Ocean of Storms watches.)
“Why would you want to sell it?”
Launch day came, and at 8am the queue at Oxford Street was so long it had to be broken into three. I counted roughly 150 people, which if the stock estimate was right, meant that even the stragglers rocking up at that point might be in with a shout.
Meanwhile, the internet was telling me that Dubai’s only Swatch shop stocking the Snoopy watch, at the Mall of Emirates, had opened four hours early because of concerns of the crowd being crushed. There had been, it said, ‘dogfights’.
At Carnaby Street someone I took to be the manager came out of the store before it opened and told the back end of the queue they were too late – although all was not lost, they’d be restocking on Friday.
Meanwhile, Covent Garden was really a scene. A line snaking around and doubling back on itself, with passers-by stopping to ask security what the fuss was about.
“A watch?” they boggled.
At 9.50 people were still joining the queue, which was now massive.
Did the guy right at the back feel optimistic?
“No, but you’ve got to be in it,” he said, nonsensically.
Security gave a two-minute warning and at 10am sharp the first Omega x Swatch Mission To The Moonphase Snoopy watch in London was sold to the man in the Hublot jacket.
Someone in the Swatch store took his photo.
Was it worth it?
“Nah,” he joked. “Load of old rubbish!”
He was off to bed.
This story is taken from Esquire's About Time newsletter, style director Johnny Davis’s straight-talking take on the wonderful world of watches. Sign up here.
