Reply With QuoteMoser have truly produced an ugly watch there with hands that are blue on blue, unreadable. It may be a marvel but by crikey they have produced an ugly one.
ExcellentOriginally Posted by PJ S
Andy
Wanted - Damasko DC57
Moser have truly produced an ugly watch there with hands that are blue on blue, unreadable. It may be a marvel but by crikey they have produced an ugly one.
Apparently the campaign has been stopped - saw the following on Insta. Thoughts?
Dear H. Moser friends and others,
No one said #MakeSwissMadeGreatAgain would be easy...
You might have noticed that we have stopped our campaign promoting our Swiss Icons Watch.
While our objective was to pay tribute to the great founders of our beautiful industry and warn against certain practices of others, the message was unfortunately sometimes misunderstood.
As such, the Swiss Icons Watch will therefore no longer be presented and won’t be sold to raise funds to support education and training of young Swiss Watchmakers.
But fear not, we still have a number of surprises to share with you next week at SIHH.
Yours sincerely,
Edouard Meylan
CEO H. Moser & Cie.
Wow! I guess their surreal sense of humour has backfired then, and in a big way. I wonder if their intention was to poke fun at derivative brands copying others’ design elements and adding marketing, but it certainly didn’t come across that way, it seemed squarely aimed at the major brands themselves. Either way, misunderstood it certainly was, just check out the comments on Hodinkee’s post of the watch here, even after they clearly said it was ironic in the description. Very few got the joke, with most thinking H Moser had seriously released this. Perhaps they could have taken more care to ensure the video ran alongside the picture. The end of the road for wacky Moser marketing stunts? ‘Stop the marketing bullsh#*!’ indeed - be careful what you wish for!
Last edited by Itsguy; 12th January 2018 at 13:13.
Lordy. I knew it would be close to the bone but it looks like it's backfired big style.
I thought this was designed as an accusation to the major brands about taking liberties with the 'Swiss Made' tag. They clearly took offence to it, even though Moser are probably quite right - a lot of a watch is probably manufactured overseas and assembled in Switzerland to gain the 'Swiss Made' label.
Moser have gone up in my book (and I've thought them arrogant in the past) about standing up with standards that used to exist and that the idea of 'Swiss Made' used to mean something.
An explanation from Moser, with a nice comment underneath from sjx
Reading between the lines, the complaint that ‘the watch now won’t be sold to raise funds to support the training and education of young Swiss watchmakers’ suggest that they’ve been forced to pull it, most likely due to a cease and desist from the humourless legal team at one of the brands they’ve poked fun at. It wouldn’t be the first time, considering how AP have sued many a brand for daring to have an octagonal bezel, not that I’m pointing fingered in their direction - it could have been any one of them or several of them if this theory proves correct.
Update: they say that it was not withdrawn due to legal action but due to 'other factors'. Which could mean no one getting the gag, but technically could also mean the threat of swift legal action if they didn't withdraw it. Who knows... But from the tone of the statement they would have auctioned it given the choice.
Last edited by Itsguy; 12th January 2018 at 18:28.
Too ugly to remain out in public...withdrawn
It doesn't make me want to see a ceramic bezel gmt AP
<chortle> Very clever of them.
I am not even sure why this watch attracted so much attention. It is so ugly that my eyes litterally hurt. They say they combined the best features of several iconic watches, this may be true, but the combination doesn't work at all. Whomever thought at Moser this would be a good idea was just smoking something illegal. But I guess they just wanted to attract attention to the brand and tgey succeeded.
It's significance is not as an attempt to be a handsome watch. It is calling out the smoke and mirrors that pervades the Swiss watch industry. I don't care if it backfired. Moser have my respect for doing this regardless.
It was not intended to be a watch that anyone would want to buy (except perhaps for some of their wealthier clients as an ironic fund raiser). It was made as a piss take.
And to attract attention to some of the grating hypocrisy in certain sections of the Swiss watch industry, and yes they did succeed.
If there's one thing I miss in the wonderful world of watches, the one all of us here love, it's humour, and I really congratulate Moser for doing this. It saddens me to see that they got in trouble for it but I guess the truth was seen as too inconvenient for someone out there. Well, for me at least, this certainly didn't backfire - instead, it alerted me to an obviously intelligent company that's not afraid to make a socio-horological statement.
Surely part of the joke, you don't think?
This for me too.
Resurrecting this thread as Moser’s Meylan gives a relatively candid interview about the whole thing to SalonQP here.
Clearly he can’t name names due to legal issues, but it seems that at least one ‘very big’ brand took strong exception to the stunt, and threatened to blow them out of the water if they didn’t lay off. At the time of the interview he appears to still be trying to process what happened, and is only just realising that the video and watch taken together read as a very direct attack on brands that have very expensive lawyers.
Ultimately for me the issue was that while a nightmare Frankenstein homage watch is a funny and attention grabbing idea, it wasn’t all that clear what the point of it was, and many didn’t even realise it was a joke. It could be criticising relying on ‘iconic’ design elements at the expense of innovation and quality, but when those same companies are making (in the case of AP) an all ceramic RO, or presenting a stunning ultra-thin perpetual calendar concept at SIHH, the accusation doesn’t really make sense. And if they are criticising marketing hype, it’s strangely circular to use marketing hype to do that. In the end it was an irresistibly attention grabbing stunt, in search of a point. But now the dust has settled and the attention is back on the more interesting watches at SIHH, as it should be, it was a storm in a horological tea cup.
Interesting interview. I think his final sentence shows they've had a bit of a rude awakening and probably a few sleepless nights. Whatever the intended message (and he puts a good but unconvincing spin on it) it was always open to interpretation and, as he now appreciates, if one of the targets really takes offence they can end you. Literally. Gone. Not coming back. That's a hell of a risk to take to make a point.
When I first saw the watch I thought it was amusing and unlikely to genuinely offend the targets. However, when you combine it with the video and Moser's rather disparaging take on the industry in general over the past 12-24 months, you can see how there are additional layers of insult that, real or perceived, could certainly rub someone up the wrong way.
Exactly. And you can imagine the fellow Swiss shouting, ‘What the hell are you doing you fool, you’re killing the golden goose!’
Indeed. The reason there is a platform for Moser to enjoy the success and profile they are currently enjoying is due to the huge growth of the industry that has come about as a direct result of decades of the type of brand building they are criticising. I have no doubt that without the massive success of many of their targets, Moser, as we know it, could not exist.
Yes, I think that's quite right; however, it's always healthy to have some criticism, and especially so, I feel, in times of success. For me, Moser's message was directed against the ossification of the brands, which is possibly setting up the industry for another crisis in the future. To my mind, many companies, and not just in the watch industry, are overly obsessed with their brand identity in this day and age - in the past, a lot of manufacturers had much more diverse product lines, which didn't necessarily exhibit the same amount of "brand DNA". If you remember car companies in the 1960s and 70s, they often bought designs from companies like Italdesign, Giugiaro etc. and simply produced them, without first making them look like everything else they made. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about watch design to know whether the same practice applies to watch brands, but just from looking at the models of my favourite brands from past decades, I see much more variety and certainly less "brand totalitarianism", if you know what I mean. I realise that the quartz crisis has turned the industry into a very different one, but I think it's beginning to show, and I think Moser tried to draw attention to this, that such a forced reactive move on part of Nicolas Hayek, brilliant as it was, sacrificed a lot of the freedom in terms what a mainstream Swiss watch company could do from that point on. This could, after all, explain why they're so utterly unable to take a joke, and if Eco's The Name of the Rose is anything to go by, it could be a symptom of something rather terminal.
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