Nicolas Hayek:NICOLAS HAYEK, who has died aged 82, was an engineering consultant who, when asked to oversee the orderly wind-up of the entire Swiss watch industry in the early 1980s, decided instead to try to save it.
The invention that resulted – a wristwatch called the Swatch, a mass-produced, battery-powered, plastic-cased band with a quartz movement – did just that.
For almost four centuries, first the pocketwatch and then the wristwatch, had been a precious possession, a hybrid of engineering and jewellery that asserted the value of its owner’s time. A timepiece with a well-wrought Swiss mechanism was a serious gift to mark adulthood, marriage, retirement.
And then, suddenly, that whole culture seemed to be over. The very idea of wearing a watch had lost most of its meaning by 1980. If you wanted to know the time, there were new liquid crystal display watches, flicking over their digital numbers, or Japanese-made electronic cheapies, never a second adrift.
In 1982, Swiss banks commissioned the head of an engineering management consultancy in Zurich to plan the ordered bankruptcy of the remaining national watch industry. But Hayek proposed nothing so terminal. He took an un-Swiss risk, merged the last important firms, Asuag and SSIH (makers of Omega, Longines and Tissot), into the Société Suisse de Microélectronique et d’Horlogerie (SMH), bought a 51 per cent stake, and radically rationalised its business model. His plan was not to produce, as the Asian manufacturers did, a copy of the Swiss past, but to project a different Swiss future.
In 1983, SMH began to market its solution. Its simplified mechanism had 51 components, about half the usual number, and it was as disposable and inexpensive as any Asian import – but far better styled. There had been fashion watches since the 1960s, but they did not have the precision and cool that Hayek’s team of engineers invested in their creation.
Hayek wanted, and got, what he called an “emotional product” – a forerunner of our personal techno-objects, such as the iPod and the BlackBerry. He named his emotional product the Swatch. That initial “S” signified both “Switzerland” and “second”, since it was cheap enough for enthusiasts to buy more than one. The Swatch company is now the world’s biggest manufacturer of watches, with an annual turnover of 5 billion Swiss francs (€3.74 billion).
Hayek was Swiss by adoption – his Lebanese father and American mother having settled in Switzerland when he was a child. He studied maths, chemistry and physics at Lyons University in France, worked as an actuary, and, using a bank loan and pawn money (he hocked his household furniture), founded his consultancy firm in 1963, advising such firms as Nestlé and Siemens.
In the context of conservative Swiss business culture, “Mr Swatch” was an eccentric showman, blithely wearing eight of his products simultaneously, four on each arm, alternating Swatches with SMH’s upmarket brands. He charged a premium for the “Made in Switzerland” label on the grander names, but even limited-edition Swatches were deliberately kept affordable.
The initial Swatch faces were the niftiest of graphic designs; in time they were supplemented by Swatch art (tapping the latest pop favourites, including Keith Haring) and Swatch fashion (the edgier designers, notably Vivienne Westwood). There were eight models in 1983. Now there are 300 a year, a collectors’ club and a high-priced trade in rare survivals.
Hayek knew instinctively that customers had relationships with wristwatches that went beyond the horologically practical, given that people may pad around naked, yet keep their watches on, and some never take them off – even in bed.
“I am not making watches only to look at the time,” he said. “I am making jewels! They are jewels!”
He loved and respected the history of the watch (so enmeshed with that of Switzerland), commissioning the Breguet firm to make a replica, no expense spared, of one originally constructed by celebrated craftsman Abraham-Louis Breguet as a gift for Queen Marie Antoinette in 1783, and ordering a costly design for the world’s thinnest watch.
SMH was renamed the Swatch group in the 1990s, in acknowledgment that the Swatch, plastic strap and all, had funded and catalysed the revival of the 19 other Swiss firms in the Société.
Hayek’s second, equally brilliant idea was the Smart car, which he intended to be the Swatch of transport – a cheap, 600cc city coupé with a hybrid electric-combustion engine, and, as Hayek said with his usual booming candour, with just enough “room for two big adults and a crate of beer”. Fun and alternative, anyhow.
Mercedes helped him produce and market it in 1998, but they disagreed over the most basic matter – its size – and the first cars did not sell well.
Mercedes bought Hayek out, changed the design and made it more expensive and less coolly Swatchlike, although Smart drivers do develop Swatchlike attachments to their vehicles.
Hayek’s son Nick became Swatch chief executive in 2003, but Hayek stayed on as president, and was still tinkering at company HQ when he died of heart failure. His daughter Nayla is on the board. His children and his wife, Marianne, survive him.
Nicolas George Hayek: born February 19th, 1928; died June 28th, 2010