`I am a grown woman,” June Berliner often says to herself. She was muttering it on a Friday night last month while driving from Beverly Hills to Sherman Oaks, Calif., in hot pursuit of a Chicchirichi packed in an egg carton.
The night before, like a human hyena cunningly circling, she stalked the store entrance closest to the Swatch counter.
Like many so afflicted, Berliner lives in a constant state of dread, knowing that at a critical moment her sandal could get stuck in the escalator, slowing her down. ”They make you want it so badly,” she said.
The object of her desire was a limited-edition Swatch watch, the rooster- faced Chicchirichi, which was being issued only for Easter (Chicchirichi being the Italian word for cock-a-doodle-doo).
”I`m only human,” the 61-year-old grandmother says. ”I want more than I`m allowed.”
At an auction at Christie`s in London, Henry Buhl, a New York photographer, paid $28,000 for a Kiki Picasso, one of only 121 Kikis in the universe. Kiki Picasso is the pseudonym of the watch`s designer, Christian Chapiron, a member of the Parisian art group Bazooka.
The Kiki, manufactured by Swatch in 1985 as a giveaway to Very Important People such as the French prime minister and Peter Fonda, was a gift for Buhl`s ex-wife in Geneva, a good friend and serious Swatch collector.
Last August, Buhl paid someone $100 to stand in line for him overnight in front of Dean & DeLuca, the Manhattan food emporium, where 999 Swatchetables were to go on sale the following morning.
Price soars
These three rather homely watches by Alfred Hofkunst, designed to look like bacon and eggs, cucumbers and red peppers, were worth $300 a set that August morning. This morning they are worth about $3,000.
Such is life on the front lines of desire, where a lowly piece of plastic, worth $7 to $20, depending on whom you talk to, has triggered an international consumer frenzy and what Edward Faber of the Aaron Faber Gallery in New York calls ”an organized worldwide treasure hunt.”
At the start, in 1983, the Swatch represented a democratic design ideal. The standard Swatch-the name came from ”Swiss watch”-still sells for $40
(for a traditional watch), $50 (for a scuba) and $80 (for the sought-after chronographs).
A division of SMH, an international conglomerate that also makes Tissot, Omega and other makes of watches, the Swatch was technologically innovative in reducing the number of components. It was a cheap watch with welded parts that could be produced on a fully automated assembly line.
But its real genius was the marketing. Taking its cue from the fashion industry, the Swatch, as one commentator put it, ”put an artist`s palette on the face of a watch.”
A portable billboard
It was essentially a wearable billboard, a graphics phenomenon. Surface pattern and decoration changed constantly, but the watch stayed the same, enabling the company to sell 10 versions of what was essentially the same thing.
Swatch was credited with wresting dominance in inexpensive watches from the Far East; today it is the fastest-selling model in watch history. ”We were convinced that if each of us could add our fantasy and culture to an emotional product, we could beat anybody,” recalled Nicholas G. Hayek, Swatch`s chairman.
Limited edition Swatch watches are now being issued for many special occasions, be it Easter, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution or United Nations Earth Summit.
Even Mother`s Day is not safe. The 10,000 special Mother`s Day Veruschkas sold at 50 stores in 20 cities in the United States-only 200 watches per store-are history.
Sold out.
It wasn`t like this when the first watch rolled off the line, about 100 million Swatches ago. Before the Swatch collectors club. Before the museum exhibitions on mutant Swatches, the result of production errors. Before the European Swatchissimo and Swatchomania auctions.
Catalogs add to desire
Before the lush catalogs, in which watches like those in the Blow Your Time Away series, with faces made unreadable by dense tufts of synthetic fur, carry estimates of $16,000 to $18,400.
At first it seemed accidental. But since 1986, when a limited series by the late Keith Haring went into production, the company has become
increasingly sophisticated at manipulating desire.
The ”uncontrollable thirst for Swatch collectibles,” as a Swatch press release describes it, is now a finely oiled, engineered machine, driven by consumers but fueled by the company.
”Sure, the limited availability of certain Swatches has heightened demand,” said Gary Girdvainis, the United States director of International Wristwatch magazine. ”But people want them. A limited edition of something nobody wants is worthless.”
Taking a cue from Andy Warhol`s ideas on art as a commodity for mass consumption, Swatch created its first art piece, the Kiki Picasso, in 1985. The next year, the company invited Haring to design a series of four Swatches, which it limited to 9,999 copies each (1986 price for the red and yellow Modele Avec Personnages, $50; 1992 price, $2,240 to $2,400).
Themes drawn from current cultural events and cryptic messages embedded in the designs appealed to young people. As Gloria Teresi, who runs the watch department for Christie`s Geneva, observes, ”The fact that there were artists involved made it slightly intellectual.”
Specials fuel flames
Even bolder was the company`s decision to start producing what it calls specials, which took an inchoate desire for collecting and cinched it into a knot.
Specials like the Velvet Underground (swathed in white or black lace) and Hocus Pocus (which came in a blue pie tin and is read through a crystal sphere) were packaging phenomena when issued in Europe. Bottone, with a band bedizened with colorful buttons, came in its own sewing kit.
Exclusivity is powerful. Cristine Reeves, who runs shelters for homeless people in New York, has spent $16,000 on Swatches, traveling to Washington to stand in line overnight to buy Swatchetables.
Berliner, the California collector, has hidden in department stores waiting for the lunch shift, so the fill-in at the Swatch counter will sell her a second watch.
”It`s something you want,” Reeves tried to explain. ”It`s something you want, and you`re afraid of not having.”
The first Swatch auction-99 Swatches made between 1983 and 1989 provided by the company-was held by Sotheby`s in September 1990 in Milan, Italy. The gavel fell at $24,768 for a 1989 Mimmo Paladino.
Inspired by Afro-Catholic Brazilian culture, it was manufactured as a giveaway to sports, art and show business people. An advertisement that appeared in the Wall jStreet Journal afterward touted the prices and said
”Here`s One Your Broker Won`t Tell You About.” Mimmos have since appreciated to $42,000.
From here, it was on to Christian de Quay in Paris and Rudolf Mangisch and Christie`s in Zurich. Mangisch is in the process of organizing the first Swatch auction in the United States, to be held at the National Academy of Design in New York in June.
Clubs organized
Swatch collecting was made official in Europe when the company organized an international collectors` club. Members are entitled to members-only special Swatches and the latest product information. In the Swatch World Journal, a Wall Street Journal clone, they are also kept informed about major collectors like an 18-year-old German who has amassed all 850 models and
”doesn`t smoke, doesn`t drink and is very conscientious about his schoolwork.”
Because the company changes its designs each season, many standard Swatches also become collectible. Potential future value is subtly hinted at in the design of the new Swatch-only store in New York, which has steel floors, display cases for ”antique” Swatches and a sleek, museum-shop air. The store recently displayed several Swatches not yet on the market.
Swatchissimo has its seamier side. A brief stroll down 5th Avenue in New York provides an education in what those involved in the Swatch underground call ”the secondary market.” At various electronics stores, of the sort that also carry jade grape clusters and cloisonne urns, a Sea Grapes scuba with a translucent strap that sells for $50 at Macy`s goes for $129, $149 or $159.
An unknown number of people are making a living selling Swatches to unauthorized dealers, who in turn sell mostly to European tourists. Authorized dealers uniformly sell at the retail prices the company suggests.
Then there are the fashionable smugglers who ”go swatching.” Two who insisted on anonymity explained their modus operandi: They score Swatches at retail in New York, then resell them in Italy for triple the price.
Italians are `crazy`
”You have to understand that in Italy they are crazy,” one explained.
”The people wear a black one with a tuxedo and then go to the beach and put on a Happy Fish.”
The company said it had taken steps to thwart such activities, in part by stepping up production by 40 percent. They say they are churning them out as fast as they can.
”I could print you in one week 500,000 Kiki Picassos,” Hayek warns collectors. ”Just open my safe, take out the pattern, and give it to the plant. I keep telling everyone this.”
But would he do it? ”Some people have been crazy enough to pay these prices, but I have no reason to hurt them just for the pleasure of hurting
(smugglers). I don`t like to hurt people.”
Faber, the dealer and collector, said: ”They say they want to stamp out speculating, but they`re fueling the Swatch as a collectors` event.”
And so, September will see 49,999 new art Swatches by Sam Francis, the abstract expressionist. To make things more equitable for all collectors, Hayek said, they will probably be sold by lottery, which probably will create even more of a frenzy.
Collectors` club members-Berliner and Buhl among them-have also reserved the new Swatch car, expected to be introduced sometime in the mid-1990s.
They don`t know anything about it. Except that they want one.
