Swatch Watches is a Swiss Watchmaker founded in 1983 by Nicolas Hayek and a subsidiary of The Swatch Group. The Swatch product line was developed as a response to the "Quartz Crisis" of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Asian-made digital watches were competing against traditional European-made mechanical watches. The name Swatch is a contraction of "Second Watch", as the watches were intended as casual, disposable accessories.
Swatch began development in the early 1980s, under the leadership of the then ETA SA's CEO, Ernst Thomke with a small team of watch engineers led by Elmar Mock and...
