1.2 million apply for 1,969 watches, and nobody queued

§1A questionnaire instead of a queue.

Swatch has replaced the queue with a questionnaire, and the arithmetic is worth writing down. To buy one of 1,969 MoonSwatch Mission to the Moon 1969 pieces, a customer had to complete the Electronic Swatch Timepiece Application, a 32-question online form. More than 1.2 million people finished it. About six hundred people applied for every watch available. The retail price is $570, a figure Swatch derived from the gold price on 21 July 1969, and JCK reports the watch carries 11 grams of 18-karat gold across the dial, hands, crown and pushers.

That metal claim deserves a bench check, because it inverts the usual accounting. Eleven grams of 18-karat is 8.25 grams of fine gold. At Tuesday's Kitco spot of $4,048.80 an ounce, or $130.17 a gram, the fine content alone is worth about $1,074, which is close to twice the ticket. Swatch is not selling a watch at a margin on materials. It is selling a date, and pricing the object at what the metal cost on the morning of the moon landing rather than at what it costs now. The scarcity is the edition size and the price is the storytelling.

§2Three months ago, the sidewalk.

The contrast is three months old and still bruising. The Royal Pop collaboration with Audemars Piguet in May drew crowds that required police outside stores in New York, Paris and London, closed 15 American shops on a Saturday, and produced trading at four to five times retail within days. JCK reports that same watch changing hands below $400 by August. Swatch Group stock rose about 15% in the two weeks after the launch, so the event worked as a market signal and failed as a customer experience, and the resale collapse suggests most of the queue was there for the flip rather than the watch.

§3What the form actually collects.

What the form actually collects is the point most of the coverage missed. A 32-question application completed 1.2 million times is a verified, self-selected, freely given database of watch buyers, their tastes and their intent, delivered at no acquisition cost against 1,969 units of inventory. Eugene Tutunikov of SwissWatchExpo, quoted by JCK, put it plainly: "nobody slept on a sidewalk." The allocation problem every hot-product retailer faces was solved with a web form, and the byproduct is worth more than the run.