WTF Is Blancpain Doing With the 50 Fathoms?
Main image source: www.blancpain.com
Note: I originally wrote this as an “Audicle” for The Real Time Show. If you have some time, please do check this episode out, as well as the show’s growing catalog!
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Hand to my heart, no joke, Blancpain is the most important brand in the world of luxury watches.
Without Blancpain - and Jean Claude Biver’s marketing savvy - the concept of a “luxury watch” as we know it today may not exist, and even mechanical watches themselves may be nothing more than a memory.
I sincerely believe that any watch company seeing success today, from Rolex selling out its displays to Zenith’s resurgence from the brink of oblivion, owes its good fortunes to Blancpain’s revival after the quartz crisis.
Now, JCB is a genius, sure, but it’s not as if he didn’t have plenty of source material from which to draw.
Not only do Blancpain’s operations go back to 1735, making it the world’s oldest watch brand according to the Swatch Group, but it also gave the world the first modern dive watch in the Fifty Fathoms, not only pre-dating the mighty Rolex Submariner, but then also going on to accumulate an enormous amount of military heritage thanks to its adoption by various armed forces.
Why is it then, given all of this history, the popularity of dive watches, and its position as the literal savior of the mechanical watch industry, in a world where Omega has ridden (and ridden…and ridden…) its Moonwatch to success, that no one, save for the hardest of hardcore watch nerds, gives a flip about Blancpain?
Consider this: Jay-Z called out Hublot - Hublot, a brand I like a lot, but it’s no Blancpain - in one of his songs, but to my knowledge neither he nor his peers have ever name-dropped Blancpain, opting instead to stick to the usual suspects of Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe.
Enter…the Swatch x Blancpain Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms.
Before I “dive” deeply into my thoughts on this one, I have to set the stage by talking about the MoonSwatch.
The MoonSwatch was the stuff of fever dreams, the equivalent of a video game pitting your favorite Street Fighter characters against the heroes of the Marvel Universe. And yet, just as Capcom made that mashup happen, and made it awesome, so too did the Swatch Group.
Their project ended up being lightning in a bottle, catching not just the watch world’s, but the whole world’s, attention, and likely becoming the subject matter for business school discussions decades from now.
Whatever the hesitations felt internally after greenlighting the MoonSwatch, they surely disappeared on launch day. The amount of “free” publicity Omega received must have been massive, and the effect on actual Moonwatch sales was also impressive, with Hodinkee reporting at the end of 2022 that since the launch of the MoonSwatch in March of that year, sales of new, current and vintage Speedmasters increased 50%.
Which gets us now to the Blancpain x Swatch collab.
I don’t read minds, but surely the reasoning behind this set of watches can’t have been more complicated than “hey, Speedmaster sales sky-rocketed when we made a Swatch version, and Blancpain’s just kind of shuffling along over there in the corner, so yea, do that MoonSwatch thing again, but for them this time.”
A little bit of kidding aside, I do appreciate that the final result doesn’t seem like an afterthought. Most significantly you have the use of an automatic Sistem51 movement. Indeed Jean-Claude Biver’s tagline that re-launched Blancpain was "Since 1735, there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be."
And so it is with Swatch’s Blancpain. Thanks to the investments Swatch and the Swatch Group made years ago in industrializing very cheap automatic movements, this watch ensures that Blancpain’s streak of mechanical movements remains unbroken.
I also like the different variants according to the oceans. To me, this fulfills what must now be Swatch’s directive going forward, which is to create that feeling of “gotta catch ‘em all” in collectors, if I may bring video games back into the mix again for a second, while also feeling very natural, just like using the solar system’s various celestial bodies.
All that said, I’ve never seen one in person, and long-story-short it’s not what I’d spend my money on if I had about 400 euros to spend on a watch. However, I own an actual Blancpain and really appreciate what the brand creates, so if these Bioceramic variants of the Fifty Fathoms help the company grow, I”m all for it.
I’m not very optimistic about this though, for several reasons.
First is that Omega was a marketing machine well before the launch of the MoonSwatch. If you were at all interested in watches, or were looking to acquire your first “nice” watch, you probably already knew that Omega is the watch for astronauts and secret agents.
Given that established heritage, even normalizing for the novel, “gonzo” nature of the MoonSwatch launch, it seems logical to me that potential buyers would be primed to step up to the real Moonwatch (or indeed any other number of Omega models) after trying on the Swatch variant.
Now well past the year mark from launch, Google Trends indicates that interest in the MoonSwatch is still there, with spikes in searches occurring over the past 12 months.
Google Trends data does not show nearly the same trend for Blancpain: after basically flatlining for the last 12 months, there was a massive spike in early September, followed by a very quick drop shortly after.
Perhaps this spike will be enough to drive Blancpain sales at their boutiques, but I’m not so sure. The company has one, true icon, the Fifty Fathoms, and who really knows about that watch besides watch nerds?
Who, besides this very small circle of people, has ever heard of the Fifty Fathoms and its heritage, or even seen one in a magazine? Now, think of how many FXD’s Tudor has sold based on playing up the watch’s use by the Marine Nationale; it really underlines Blancpain’s lack of effort in championing its phenomenal history.
Back to Omega, unlike its sister brand, Blancpain has not done a good job of creating desire for their own watches prior to the Swatch collaboration, so how can more mainstream buyers be expected to step up to them, let alone get excited for the much cheaper Swatch version?
In my opinion, the mismanagement of the mainline Fifty Fathoms (not the Bathyscaphe line) exceeds even the baffling decision by IWC to wait until late last year to join the integrated bracelet sports watch crowd with its own icon, the Ingenieur, and I’m shocked that Blancpain continues to stumble forward with such an important piece of watch history.
The current version of the watch is 45 mm in diameter, introduced at a time when large watches were all the rage but which is now far behind the current trends. Think about this: the Swatch version is 42.3 mm across, not too far off from the original’s 42 mm sizing!
Yes, there have been smaller version issued over the years, but unless you are a true Fifty Fathoms scholar you will go cross-eyed trying to make sense of them, and each and every time Blancpain comes out with a contemporarily-sized offering, such as the very popular Hodinkee collaboration from several years ago, it is a limited edition.
Blancpain is now celebrating the 70th anniversary of the introduction of the Fifty Fathoms. This should be the perfect chance to introduce a smaller version of the mainline watch, but no, instead we get dive watches like the Tech Gombessa that are technically quite cool, I suppose, but there is no way that these will be enough to turn Blancpain around.
If I were CEO…
Hold that thought, because I’m not the CEO, but you know who is?
Marc Fricking Hayek.
Yes, the CEO of Blancpain is the grand-son of the founder of the Swatch Group and the nephew of the current CEO of the Swatch Group.
This guy has a pedigree that should have him running circles around Jean Claude Biver, and yet it’s 2023 and the Fifty Fathoms you can walk into a boutique today and buy is still 45 mm.
I just don’t understand what’s going on.
Maybe I’m simply impatient and Blancpain will unveil the Fifty Fathoms the world wants at the end of the year, the final flourish on a birthday cake one year in the making.
Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong, and the goal for the Blancpain x Swatch launch, and every subsequent Swatch collab, is actually to drive traffic to Swatch boutiques. After all, again according to Hodinkee, as of January 2023, Swatch sold 1 million MoonSwatches, and surely more than a few consumers walked in for those and ended up walking out with a couple of other Swatch watches, perhaps gifts for budding watch lovers in their friends and family circles.
Or, maybe Blancpain is just meant to be the sandbox where a few people get to play around, not really meant to do much but satisfy their own whims as opposed to actually selling watches.
But really, I cannot understand how the Swatch Group, a publicly traded company which owns Omega, would allow that, rather than trying to create another cash cow like the maker of the Moonwatch.
Put another way, even if driving traffic to Swatch boutiques were the actual goal, I can’t imagine the Swatch Group wouldn’t want to double-dip by also building the foundation of the brand contributing its heritage to the projects.
Anyways, if I were CEO, I’d make it priority one to normalize the Fifty Fathoms, then market the hell out of it, perhaps handing out a few models here and there to some key influencers.
Just executing on that initiative would be no small task, but in a world where I’m boss, I’d then move on to shining the light on the gorgeous dress watches Blancpain makes. I’m not saying that a Blancpain Villeret will be cross-shopped with an FP Journe anytime soon, but those Villerets deserve far more attention than they receive currently.
Finally, I’d reintroduce the Leman line, which is a gorgeous collection of watches from the late 90’s/early 2000’s which incorporate a range of complications in slim cases sized around 40 mm across. If you think the Rolex Explorer is played out but like that vibe, search for “Blancpain Leman” on Chrono24 and thank me later.
By the way, quick aside on that Leman collection. It is discontinued, but the one model that is still known in watch circles is the Grande Date Aqua Lung, also known as the “Putin watch” because he’s been seen wearing one.
The Aqua Lung is, to me, gorgeous, a true “connoisseur’s” Explorer alternative, but the fact that so many watch enthusiasts instinctively associate Blancpain with a war criminal tells you all you need to know about how little Blancpain has tried to create, manage, and own its image.
And yet, here we are…
So yea, those are the things I’d love to see Blancpain do if I were CEO.
But I’m not, so in the meantime…
Enjoy your Bioceramic Fifty Fathoms everybody!