Ben Clymer

analog time telling, but with a battery, which was dramatically more precise.

I mean, like dramatically more precise than mechanical watchmaking.

What is interesting to think about, and I give full credit to my old colleague, Joe Thompson, who's a legend in the watch writing world, is the Japanese came in with quartz, Seiko created it effectively,

came in and there was a war between Swiss mechanical watchmaking and quartz analog timekeeping.

And to be clear, the Swiss lost.

The Swiss lost by a country mile.

So all of a sudden, those guys that were buying a Rolex or an Omega or a Goyer because they were the most precise thing in the world just said, you know what?

Why would I do that?

I can buy a quartz watch that is 10 times more accurate.

10 times.

And by the way, you don't need to have it serviced.

You just swap out the new battery or whatever all the time.

And that decimated the Swiss watch industry to a point where very, very few brands were producing things at a profit of any kind.

Jack Hoyer, whose family owned Tech, before it was Tech, it was just Hoyer at the time, in his biography, I mean, he talks almost going into bankruptcy.

If you talk to Thierry Stern, whose father, Philippe Stern, and his grandfather have owned the tech for generations, in the late 70s, they had to borrow against, you know, with their banks.

It's existential.

Yeah.

This was real.

And it wasn't just the smaller brands.

The tech had issues.