Reframing The Quartz Crisis: It Wasn’t The End Of Watchmaking, It Was The Catalyst Of Today’s Luxury Fortress
How quartz rewired the Swiss watch industry, reshaped what mechanical watches mean, and quietly laid the groundwork for today’s hyper-consolidated, ultra-premium market.
I used to ask my students a simple question. Does history change?
Most would instinctively say no. History is the past. What happened happened. But the longer you live with history, the more you realize that while events themselves do not change, our understanding of them absolutely does. Time, distance, and perspective reshape meaning. Hindsight gives us new language for old moments. We revise not the facts, but the lessons we draw from them.
Few moments in modern horology have been framed as definitively, and as negatively, as the Quartz Crisis. It is often described as the near death of Swiss mechanical watchmaking, a rupture in tradition, a technological shockwave that flattened centuries of craft in a matter of years. In the familiar version of the story, quartz was the villain, mechanical watches the victim.
That version is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
What Was The Quartz Crises
The Quartz Crisis is generally understood as the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, when electronic quartz movements displaced mechanical watches as the dominant form of timekeeping. Quartz watches were not merely competitive. They were categorically superior at the one task watches had historically been built to perform. They were dramatically more accurate, cheaper to manufacture at scale, easier to maintain, and far more consistent across environmental conditions.
When Seiko unveiled the Astron in 1969, it introduced not just a new product, but a new philosophy of timekeeping. Accuracy was no longer something to be chased through regulation, certification, and mechanical refinement. It became a baseline feature of the technology itself. Timekeeping was no longer an art form. It was an electronic process. Within a few short years, quartz movements were rapidly miniaturized, industrialized, and pushed into the global market.
But the early quartz era was not defined by analog watches alone. The first wave of cultural shock came from digital watches. In the early 1970s, LED digital watches captured the public imagination with glowing numerical displays and fully electronic construction. (Looking at you Hamilton Pulsar). Yet the LED boom was short-lived. The technology was power hungry, prone to quality issues, and required the wearer to push a button just to see the time. Prices collapsed as production scaled and margins evaporated, and many early digital pioneers disappeared almost as quickly as they had arrived.
The real digital revolution came not from LEDs, but from LCDs. Liquid crystal displays proved more efficient, more reliable, and far better suited to mass production. As LCD technology matured, digital watches flooded the market at increasingly affordable price points. Production shifted rapidly toward East Asia, with Hong Kong emerging as a major global manufacturing hub for digital watches by the end of the 1970s. Timekeeping, once the province of Swiss workshops, became a global electronics product.
Throughout this period, Seiko pursued a markedly different strategy. Rather than chasing the LED boom, the company concentrated on refining analog quartz and LCD based digital watches, investing early in vertical integration across integrated circuits, batteries, and display technology. Manufacturing became increasingly automated, and employees were retrained for electronics driven production. This long view allowed Seiko to ride out the collapse of the LED craze and emerge as a dominant global watchmaker by the late 1970s.
Swiss manufacturers, meanwhile, were actively exploring quartz through research institutions like the Centre Electronique Horloger, which developed the Beta 21 movement. In 1970, brands including Omega, Patek Philippe, and Rolex released quartz watches built around this architecture. These early Swiss quartz models demonstrated technical competence, but they struggled commercially. Their thickness, power demands, and high prices positioned them as proofs of concept rather than scalable market solutions.
As quartz matured, competition shifted from pure novelty to refinement. The late 1970s saw what amounted to a technological arms race in thinness. Brands began pushing quartz movements into ever slimmer cases, transforming quartz watches into objects of elegance rather than simply efficiency. Swiss manufacturers scored a symbolic victory with the ultra thin Delirium.
By the end of the 1970s, the quartz market had effectively split. Digital watches dominated the low end, driven by mass production and price compression. Analog quartz watches occupied the middle and upper tiers, offering slim profiles, reliable timekeeping, and increasingly refined design. Brands that had once defined themselves through mechanical innovation were now competing in a marketplace where timekeeping was cheap, precise, and ubiquitous.
This was the true rupture of the Quartz Crisis. It was not simply that mechanical watches were challenged by a new technology. It was that the meaning of a watch itself changed. Timekeeping had been solved. Precision had been democratized. Watches became more accessible than ever. For the first time in history, highly accurate time was no longer a luxury. It was an expectation.
And in doing so, quartz forced mechanical watchmaking to confront an uncomfortable truth. If watches were only about telling time, the battle was already lost. What followed was not extinction, but evolution.
Stripped of its monopoly on accuracy, mechanical watchmaking was forced to rediscover its deeper value. Craft, tradition, finishing, and mechanical complexity took on new meaning. The crisis clarified what mechanical watches were not. They were no longer the most precise instruments available. They were no longer the most practical. But in losing those claims, they gained a new identity.
What Exactly Is A Quartz Watch?
Mechanical watches, even at their best, are inherently vulnerable to variation from gravity, temperature, shock, lubrication, and wear. Throughout the twentieth century, chronometry competitions and observatory trials pushed mechanical precision to its limits, but they also revealed a ceiling. At the same time, postwar optimism around technology and rapid advances in miniaturization made electronics feel less speculative and more inevitable. In that context, the battery powered wristwatch was not a leap of imagination. It was the logical next step.
We call them quartz watches because quartz crystal sits at the heart of the technology. Quartz has a peculiar and extraordinarily useful property known as piezoelectricity. When an electric current is applied to a quartz crystal, it vibrates at a highly stable and predictable frequency. In a quartz watch, that vibration becomes the reference for timekeeping (known as the timebase). Instead of regulating time through the oscillation of a balance wheel and hairspring, as in a mechanical watch, a quartz movement uses the vibrations of a crystal, typically at 32,768 times per second. An electronic circuit counts those vibrations and converts them into precise, regular pulses that drive the display.
The appeal of this was obvious to engineers long before it was practical for consumers. Quartz clocks existed as laboratory instruments as early as the 1920s, used in telecommunications, scientific research, and radio broadcasting where extreme accuracy mattered. The problem was size and power. Early quartz clocks were enormous, fragile, and impractical for anything wearable. They also required stable electrical power sources that simply did not exist in compact, reliable form at the time.
The development of small, dependable batteries was one of the quiet revolutions that made quartz wristwatches possible. The modern button cell emerged from mid twentieth century advances in electrochemistry, shaped by wartime research and later accelerated by the rise of portable consumer electronics. Companies like Union Carbide and Eveready (I see you drumming bunny) refined miniature power sources that were stable, long lasting, and safe enough to be worn on the wrist. Without this parallel evolution in battery technology, the quartz watch would have remained a laboratory curiosity rather than a consumer product.
The Impact Of Swatch
You cannot talk about quartz watches without talking about Swatch, because Swatch was not just a brand. It was a strategy, a philosophy, and, in many ways, a last stand that became a cultural revolution.
By the late 1970s, the Swiss watch industry was in free fall. Two massive conglomerates, ASUAG and SSIH, which together controlled much of Switzerland’s watchmaking ecosystem, were burdened by debt, internal inefficiencies, and an inability to compete with the scale, pricing, and speed of Japanese quartz producers. The old vertically integrated Swiss model, once the envy of the world, was collapsing under its own weight.
Nicolas G. Hayek entered the picture as a consultant tasked with determining whether the Swiss industry could even be saved. His conclusion was blunt. Switzerland could not beat quartz on price or outproduce Asia on volume using legacy manufacturing methods. However, it could outthink the competition by restructuring the industry itself and reimagining what a Swiss watch could be.
Hayek helped orchestrate the merger of ASUAG and SSIH into what would become the Swatch Group, stabilizing Swiss manufacturing and preserving the industrial backbone that high end mechanical watchmaking would later rely on. Brands like Omega, Longines, Breguet, and others found shelter under this umbrella, gaining the financial runway needed to rediscover their identities in a post quartz world.
Swatch, launched in 1983, became the consumer-facing expression of this new thinking. It represented a radical departure from Swiss convention. The name itself was a contraction of Swiss and watch, with the added implication of a “second watch,” something one could own alongside others rather than instead of them. This framing was intentional. Hayek understood that the future of watch ownership would not be singular, but plural, and that consumers would move fluidly between watches as expressions of identity.
Swatch watches were engineered for mass production in ways Swiss watches had never embraced before. Movements were simplified and integrated directly into the case, reducing parts, assembly time, and cost. Plastic cases enabled bold color, playful form, and price points that traditional metal cased Swiss watches could not reach.
From the beginning, Swatch positioned the watch as a lifestyle object. Limited editions, seasonal releases, and collaborations with artists such as Keith Haring, Kiki Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Annie Leibovitz turned watches into expressions of pop culture. A Swatch was not positioned as an heirloom. It was positioned as a reflection of the present moment.
Swatch demonstrated that quartz watches did not have to be anonymous commodities. They could carry emotion, identity, and cultural relevance. This reframing pulled watches back into the public imagination at a moment when timekeeping itself was becoming increasingly invisible, absorbed into phones, clocks, and screens.
In hindsight, Swatch did not merely coexist with the Quartz Crisis. It leveraged the moment to reposition Switzerland within the mass market on its own terms, while mechanical watchmaking was given the space to evolve into something more deliberate, expressive, and explicitly cultural.
The Post-Quartz Era
The post quartz era gave rise to a heightened preservation of mechanical watchmaking. Not as a default technology, but as a cultural object. Brands leaned into heritage, finishing, complications, and the romance of human made machines. Independent watchmakers found new audiences. Collecting became less about owning the best tool and more about stewarding a lineage of ideas. Mechanical watches became meaningful precisely because they were no longer necessary.
Seen through this lens, the Quartz Crisis was not just a period of destruction. It was a crucible. It burned away assumptions about what watches were supposed to be and left behind a sharper understanding of what they could be.
There is no single end date of the Quartz Crises, but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the tone of the industry had shifted. Mechanical watchmaking was no longer fighting for survival. It was being consciously revived.
Some of the most important names in modern mechanical watchmaking owe their existence, or their rebirth, to this post quartz reorientation.
A. Lange & Söhne, dormant for decades under East German nationalization, was resurrected in the 1990s with a vision of German watchmaking that leaned unapologetically into craft, finishing, and mechanical seriousness. Its revival was not about necessity. It was about identity. In a world where quartz had already solved timekeeping, Lange’s watches existed to make a statement about what mechanical excellence could still mean.
Roger W. Smith’s continuation of the Daniels tradition in Britain is another product of this shift. The very idea that a single watchmaker could hand build complete watches in the twenty first century would have seemed quixotic in a purely utilitarian age of timekeeping. It only makes sense in a post quartz world where mechanical watches exist as expressions of human labor, continuity, and authorship rather than technological necessity.
This era also created space for the rise of the auteur watchmaker more broadly. Freed from the pressure to build the most accurate or affordable watch, independent creators could treat horology as a medium for personal vision. The watch became a canvas for individual philosophy. How time is displayed. How a movement is structured physically. What finishing says about values. The post quartz world made room for voice in a way the pre quartz industrial model rarely allowed.
At the other end of the spectrum, the same decoupling of function from meaning enabled the growth of microbrands and design–led watchmaking. As reliable 3rd party mechanical movements became widely available, the movement itself stopped being the primary barrier to entry. Designers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts who were not traditional watchmakers could now participate in shaping watch culture. The creative energy shifted toward case design, dial language, materials, storytelling, and community. Quartz did not just democratize timekeeping. It indirectly democratized authorship.
The end of the so-called crisis was not the disappearance of quartz. Quartz never went away. The end came when mechanical watchmaking stopped trying to justify itself as the best way to tell time and instead embraced its role as a cultural, artistic, and human practice.
Which is why the language of “crisis” increasingly feels inadequate.
What happened was not only collapse, but recalibration. Not just disruption, but reorientation. Not merely survival, but reinvention. Perhaps it is time we rename the period for what it actually was.
The Quartz Reformation. The Great Recalibration. The Timekeeping Renaissance. The Mechanical Revival.
History does not change. But our relationship to it does.
And when reconsidered not as an ending but as an inflection point, the quartz era looks less like the moment mechanical watchmaking almost died and more like the moment it finally learned why it mattered.
A Story Continued: From Quartz to Today’s Luxury Fortress
Yes, we can revisit the Quartz Crisis and acknowledge what it catalyzed, but “positive outcomes” do not automatically redeem the event itself. War produces innovation, alliances, and economic booms in certain sectors, but the war is still war. In the same way, quartz did not have to be the death of Swiss watchmaking for it to still be a brutal, destabilizing period with real casualties, both human and cultural.
Any time of upheaval forces change in all directions, and those that adapt survive. In business especially, those that move too slowly get left behind. Blockbuster and Nokia are reminders that even dominant companies can vanish, remembered less for what they built and more for a few good ad campaigns.
This past week Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult released their 9th annual Swiss Watch Report and the data, when considered through the lens of the Quartz Crises, shows there is something peculiar going on that not everyone is discussing.
Quartz As The Original Consolidation Engine
One of the defining responses to the quartz shock was structural (i.e. Swatch), not merely technological. The Swiss industry did not just adapt its products. It reconfigured its power centers. What emerged from the wreckage was a model built to survive disruption through scale, vertical integration, and brand hierarchy. The merger driven response that created today’s dominant corporate architecture was not a side effect. It was the solution.
Kingflum’s aka ScrewDownCrown had a great synthesis of the report essentially stating that consolidation has matured into a market where scale and brand equity matter more than volume, and where pricing power has become the most reliable growth lever. The Swiss watch market contracted for a second consecutive year in 2025, down 1.7% in export value. At the same time volume fell to 14.6 million units, a multi decade low that is roughly half of the industry’s 2011 peak.
The industry is shrinking in units but holding up in revenue because it is “premiumising.” Watches above CHF 50,000 retail accounted for over a third of Swiss export value and 89% of all growth, while representing only 1.4% of units shipped.
That is not a healthy pyramid. It is a top heavy one. It also reads like a market that has learned, perhaps too well, that it can grow without bringing new people into the tent. In other words, the modern industry is acting like a consolidated luxury ecosystem, not a broad based manufacturing category. That is a direct descendant of the quartz era response.
The Market’s Load Bearing Wall
The top four brands by retail market share are Rolex, Cartier, AP, and Omega, and together they account for 55% of the entire market.
But the most telling split is not simply share of the market. It is profit. The four largest privately owned brands, Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Richard Mille, control 49.1% market share and captured roughly 76% of the industry’s total profit pool.
This is not a normal competitive landscape. This is a fortress economy.
The clearest expression of the modern watch brand business model is the ability to combine industrial scale with managed scarcity, while monetizing both primary and secondary markets. In this model, wholesale revenues can continue to grow even as unit volumes flatten or decline, driven by rising average selling prices and tightening control over supply. Value is no longer created by selling more watches, but by making fewer watches more expensive.
That is premiumisation in its purest form: fewer units, higher prices, stronger brand gravity. The institutional embrace of certified pre-owned programs marks the next stage of this strategy. What was once an external secondary market has been folded into the brand’s economic architecture, allowing value to be captured across the full lifecycle of the product without collapsing the symbolic hierarchy between new and pre-owned.
To take a step back for a moment — quartz forced the industry to detach value from function. The contemporary luxury watch business has perfected the art of value without volume.
“Premiumisation” as the New Quartz Logic
Quartz made accuracy cheap and ubiquitous. Once the core function of a watch became commoditized, brands had to compete on meaning, scarcity, and status. Today’s data suggests the industry has pushed that logic to its limit. Kingflum describes it as gentrification, and the numbers support the metaphor. Swiss exports have effectively halved in 15 years, yet revenue is being defended through higher price tiers.
The industry is not trying to sell more watches. It is trying to sell more expensive watches to fewer people.
The post quartz mechanical renaissance is real, and it created a golden age of independent creativity and high horology. However, it also helped reposition mechanical watchmaking as a luxury good rather than a broadly accessible craft. Once mechanical watches became a cultural object, they also became a luxury object. Those two shifts are inseparable.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that the “mechanical revival” was not only a story of artistry. It was also a story of stratification.
The “Middle Class” Problem and the Long Tail of Quartz
Kingflum’s closing remarks are blunt, and they align with what many collectors have felt anecdotally for years. He calls the report “a eulogy for the middle class of watchmaking,” arguing that the industry is shedding volume, concentrating power, and pricing out the non-elite buyer.
If the Quartz Crisis was the event that forced Switzerland to reinvent itself, then one of the clearest reinventions was the creation of a luxury watch market that could thrive even as units collapsed. The modern industry is not built to serve the middle. It is built to extract growth from the top. Again to state a statistic previously mentioned, watches above CHF 50,000 retail are driving 89% of growth while comprising 1.4% of units is not just a statistic. It is a thesis about the state of the luxury watch industry.
The Quartz Crisis did not only save Swiss watchmaking through reinvention. It also pushed the industry toward a structure where consolidation and premiumisation became the safest path forward. That structure is now mature, and the Morgan Stanley numbers read like its endgame.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Yes, we should reconsider the Quartz Crisis. We should stop treating it as a simple tragedy with a single villain. We should acknowledge what it unlocked: Swatch, the democratization of timekeeping, the mechanical renaissance, and the rise of independent authorship.
But we should also name what it set in motion.
It taught the Swiss industry to survive by consolidating power and moving upmarket. It created an ecosystem where value is increasingly concentrated in a handful of brands, and where growth is disproportionately driven by ultra high price points.
It left behind a market that can halve its unit output in fifteen years and still call it stability because the top of the pyramid is expanding.
The Quartz Crisis was a revolution. It was also a reckoning. And if today’s numbers are any indication, we are still living inside the industrial and economic shape it carved.