I was walking by the San Francisco Swatch store and dropped in to take a look at the Blancpain collaboration. The Swatch employee said they still only had limited colors of the MoonSwatch available but every color of the Blancpain was in stock. I’m not interested in either but it confirmed my suspicions that the Blancpain isn’t nearly as popular as the MoonSwatch, especially at the higher price point.
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To be expected. Blancpain has never been a “cool” brand. The Fifty Fathoms is ugly and dated. Sparse to a fault, like those Unimatic watches. Just my opinion, to each their own. It’s also $400 plastic watch that can’t be serviced. The ETA quartz movement in the Moonswatch runs on batteries and objectively has a longer theoretical service life vs a sistem51 movement.
The color selection is hideous. There’s no “Mission to the Moon” option available. Imagine a black on black bezel option with the iconic yellow/red no rads indicator…but of course people would never bother buying the real thing if that were the case. The Fifty Fathoms doesn’t have the same mythological pull that the Moonwatch has.
Casuals don’t know Blancpain, they don’t care if the watch is automatic.
The moonswatch was so popular because a majority of people know Omega,being the first of the limited releases also built up hype, and people actually got to feel and see that the quality is the same as a swatch (which personally I’m not sure why people expected anything else from a $260 dollar watch)
Apart from that the colors are garish.
The Speedy is a fine watch, and Moonswatch did a good job capturing the look of the real think in a plastic package. It’s an attractive watch even if it’s clearly a toy version of it.
The true Fifty Fathoms is a very distinguished watch, but the Swatch FF looks like the worst kind of plastic McDonald’s toy imaginable, while also charging you even more money.
The Moonswatch is a meme but it is an attractive meme. The FF is a hideous meme.
Of course it is. Nobody other than watch enthusiasts ever heard the name Blancpain before.
Imo the color choices also make a difference. The moonswatch color choices are fun, all look amazing, and some of them tap into unique heritage like the hands on the mission to Mars. The blancpain colors on the other hand are pretty much all ugly but 2. I saw a few comments talking about how bad they looked on the leak and new right away this was a dud from the get go. Not much the price is absurd. That’s actual good watch money. You could buy a quartz prx for around that, a bunch of seikos. Just a bad pricepoint for novelty. I also think the automatic movement moves it into more watch enthusiast space, where as the moonswatch had more mainstream appeal. And watch enthusiast are going to more critical of a trash automatic then a quartz watch imo
What immediately turned me off is they are not serviceable. If it breaks down…which it will…you get to toss in the garage.
50 fathoms….300 ft. 😂
They look cool to me, would be a cool backup dive watch
The rating was accomplished by them in the early 1950s. It was a big deal. The name stuck.
As others have stated they are overhyped “watches” that can’t even be serviced. People paying hundreds for a disposable watch.
I was there on Friday and they did not have a full stock of blancpain. So they must have got a delivery recently.
A quartz chrono makes so much more sense for a disposable plastic watch than a $400 automatic.
The MoonSwatch was cool cause the colors made sense and actually looked good. None of the Blancpain colors look good.
I just looked them up for the first time and they look like plastic children’s toys that you’d get at Walmart.
I don’t know if it’s a dud. The sales are obviously not going to be as high as with the Moonswatch, but without any inside knowledge, there’s no way of knowing. They could certainly have met or exceeded expectations.
However, I suspect that you are at least in the right direction. They aren’t heavily promoted in the stores during the most important sales period of the year. The Simpsons donut watch is all over the Swatch stores I’ve see , with the Blancpain collection off in the corner with the rest of the regular Swatches. They clearly aren’t leading with it for Christmas, and we’re only a couple of months on.
Watch YouTubers and hobbyists aren’t the general public, and that’s where Swatch lives.
The FF doesn’t have the same hype as the Speedmaster
The price point was way too high.
I was in Berlin a month ago, people was still lining up outside the SWATCH store. No idea if it was for the Blancpain or MoonSwatch.
I could buy any colour the MoonSwatch in Bangkok 8 months ago.
The fifty fathoms is sold only at KaDeWe, so that was a Moonswatch line you were looking at