The traditional watch market was being decimated by smart watches, I had read about 10 years ago. But not the entire watch market, apparently. Later I read that luxury watch sales are still strong among… well, wildly rich people I suppose.
More recently, I read somewhere (and in danger of sounding like I believe everything I read, which I don’t), younger people are flocking back to “dumb” watches. This bodes well for watchmakers, I suppose.
And then it occurred to me that I actually know a watchmaker. I met a French bloke named Nico while drinking in a village near Dijon back in 2002. I’ve totally lost touch with him, as at the time he wasn’t a watchmaker, we were quite drunk, and all I recall is that he really, really liked the Spiderman movies starring Toby Maguire.
But I am still close friends with Mane, who introduced us that night. She is one of the Besties on a previous map. And she is still close to him, and she told me that he is no longer a furniture maker – his first career – nor an interior renovator – as he built her massively complicated staircase in her ancient stone house about 10 years ago – but rather, Nico is now living in Switzerland and apprenticing as a watchmaker. (Update: she has no idea if he still loved the early 2000s Spiderman movies.)
So in honor of Nico (a.k.a., Cool Raoul!) and National Watch Day, I thought I would find data showing how Swiss watch exports are fairing recently.
- Where are they still selling?
- What’s the value of watches are exported (in Swiss Francs) each year?
- Where do they get sent?
- Do any countries import a disproportionate value of Swiss watches per person?
These are questions that few people are dying to find answers for, but those are the questions I, and my trusty LLM agents, came up with to celebrate the day. So there you have it.
Caveats. The dataset shows export value, not sales.
Honestly, there may be warehouses full of Swiss-built watches unsold around the world. Personally, I have a drawer with about two or three I haven’t used in over a decade myself, and counting the other family members in my house, who have all gone through the inevitable “Swatch phase” of their teens, we probably have about 12 forgotten Swiss-built watches somewhere.
However, those were indeed purchased, so those wouldn’t disrupt this dataset. And to speak to the longevity of Swiss watches, many of these were purchased using West German Deutsch Marks, which tells you how long it’s been since my wife or I bought lots of “dumb” watches as opposed to smart ones… which may be a useful, though one-off indicator, of trouble for the Swiss watch industry.
I suppose this means my house qualifies as a museum of vintage plastic Swiss temporal time pieces. Strange. My dad has dozens of antique pendulum clocks in his house. This makes some sense. He winds them up on a regular schedule, almost ritualistically, maintaining a cacophony of out-of-sync tick-tocks that apparently give him joy. But unused watches? In drawers? Why do I have such a difficult time weeding those out? Perhaps it’s nostalgia for past times? But again… you know it… as usual… I digress.
Today’s map is yet another Leaflet Web Mercator map. I’ll be honest: once you’ve mapped enough with D3 Equal Earth, looking at Leaflet, Google Maps, or any Web Mercator, etc., is an eyesore. But they can’t all be D3 maps. The Leaflet implementation is quirky, though. It’s doing some funky stuff with the pop-ups, making them jerk around unnecessarily.
Now, if this were my day job, I would spend another 15 minutes or so trying to get Leaflet to play nice. But this is Friday, and it’s Juneteenth. It’s a national holiday here. So… I’m sorry, Nico, this is not as polished as that gorgeous modern staircase you built in Voillans. But it will have to do. 🙂
Without further ado… here is where Swiss watches are still being exported to – though, again, I have no idea who is buying them or if any of the news reports, that constantly contradict one another on the topic, are true. I’m just here to celebrate watches.
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