Just Because The Swatches That Aren't Watches

Just six years into Swatch's existence in 1989, it launched its first non-watch product, a line of home phones, but in classic Swatch fashion, they couldn’t just be normal phones. The Swatch Twinphone was a landline with a normal handset plus a second handset built into the underside of the phone's base, allowing two people to join a phone call at once.

Functionally, it was a pretty damn good home phone, with the added function to preprogram numbers in and call them by simply spelling out the name of the person you were ringing for shortcut calling (as the ad above demonstrates, alongside the final boss of 80s haircuts). But Swatch already knew the key to their success in changing fashion was to double down on design, so they called up the godfather of industrial design, Giorgetto Giugiaro, to design the Twinphone (but not on a Swatch phone, as he hadn’t created it yet).

If you aren’t familiar with Giugiaro by name, you’re definitely familiar with his designs. Listing them all would take a whole other article, but Giugiaro and his firm Italdesign are responsible for the Volkswagen Golf, the DeLorean DMC-12, the Fiat Panda, a ton of Seikos (including the 7128-7000 "Ripley", famously worn by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens), the Nikon F3, a new pasta shape, and most Alfa Romeos from the 1960s to the 2000s.

Giugiaro designed the Twinphone to be provocative and bright, and it was offered in a huge range of garish colours and transparent plastics. It featured a jagged and aggressive handset shape in contrast with the rounded landlines of the past, paired with a straight-lined and thick base, making it easy to grip. Swatch sold millions of the Twinphones, so keep your eye out next time you’re sniffing around an op shop.

Over the years, most watch brands have made a hat or a jacket, usually given away as promotional or press items. Swatch went a little harder than that. Following its explosive early popularity, Swatch quickly expanded from fashion watches into fashion itself and produced a massive range of clothes and accessories.

We’re talking t-shirts, backpacks, swimwear, beach towels, shaving razors, stationery, sarongs, dresses, umbrellas, sunglasses (called Swatch Shields), pocket knives… I could go on, the breadth of the collections is astounding - nothing was safe from the Swatch effect!

The designs all shared a common thread: they were bright, fun, and didn't take themselves too seriously, exactly like the Swatch watches themselves. Looking at these ads, it absolutely captures the late 80s/early 90s zeitgeist, tapping into the Memphis design movement - it's reminiscent of early multi-coloured Apple before they flattened all the fun and colour out of their devices. Get me that white deconstructed Swatch dial jumper immediately.

Remember Smart cars? They’re a less common sight than they were in their 2000s heyday, and the brand still exists, but did you know that SMART is actually a portmanteau? It's short for Swatch Mercedes Art - yes, Swatch made a car. With Mercedes-Benz, no less.

The idea came from Swatch Group CEO Nicolas Hayek himself way back in 1982, before the Swatch watch was even launched, who saw an opportunity to revolutionise the automotive industry in the exact same way he ended up revolutionising the watch industry with Swatch. The car would champion personalisation and self-expression, seeing a gap in the market for a stylish city car, which he called the Swatchmobile.

Hayek shopped the idea around with the major brands and landed a deal with Volkswagen in 1991, which all came crashing down when VW's notoriously prickly boss, Ferdinand Piëch (the man behind the Bugatti Veyron), scuttled the deal, fearing it would compete with his own upcoming efficient city car, the VW Lupo 3L. Hayek went back to the drawing board, eventually tying the knot with Mercedes-Benz's parent company Daimler-Benz after being shot down by Fiat, BMW, General Motors and Renault.

Mercedes split off two subsidiary companies for the project, one to design the car and the other to engineer it, obtusely keeping the design in-house and leaving Swatch to engineer the car's drivetrain. Swatch was at least kept involved to sign off on the final design. Hayek pushed hard to keep the Swatchmobile name, but lost out with it being christened the Smart, but his vision for a small, brightly-coloured, expressive microcar became a production reality.

Fittingly, a Smart edition Swatch did lovingly debut alongside the Smart City-Coupe, packaged in a Smart Car-shaped box which even featured a ‘Swatchmobil’ logo. The date on the dial commemorates the date the first car rolled off the production line. Swatch has long since divested from the joint venture that birthed the Smart car: Hayek was never truly satisfied with the Smart car (he pushed for a hybrid drivetrain) and sold his stake back to Daimler-Benz in 1998. Still, the Smart name remains as a hint to its Swatchy origins.

What spurred this article was my stumbling across one of the Swatch Twinphones on display at the Brussels Design Museum, sending me down a rabbit hole of Swatch products. Swatch had some incredible product design! I was also quite surprised to learn that Swatch Shields, the company's line of sunglasses, is the only survivor of their late 80s/early 90s product lines. Did you know Swatch still sells sunglasses? Have you ever seen them in-store? The current sunglasses lineup consists of five pairs of very plain, vaguely 60s-looking oversized frames in some safe, desaturated colours.

Swatch, you’re sitting on a goldmine! To know their archive consists of these outrageously loud 90s and Y2K design gems, I have zero doubt that if Swatch redesigned, or even just revived, these today, they would be an instant hit; just look at the current popularity of Oakley and Pit Viper sunglasses, let alone the broader revival of 90s and 20000s fashion icons. After learning about Swatch's younger, more rebellious and less serious days, I know what I want. I want a bit of the old Swatch in my life.