Finally, more than two years after queuing for hours outside Swatch’s Covent Garden shop, only for it to not open due to security concerns, I’m now the owner of a MoonSwatch.
A lot has happened in those two-and-a-half years, and Swatch certainly hasn’t shied away from milking the MoonSwatch cash cow for all it’s worth. But now, finally, buying 2022’s hottest watch is now just a case of walking into a Swatch store and picking your favourite.
In my case, I went for the Mission to Pluto. Back at the 2022 launch I had my aim focused on the Mission to Moon, since it looked most like a proper Omega Speedmaster, and the vaguely Tiffany Blue-coloured Mission to Uranus (are we still allowed to giggle at that one? Good.) How times, and taste in watches, change.
I was drawn to the burgundy details of the Pluto MoonSwatch a year ago when the infallible Instagram algorithm served me a photo of a beautiful leather strap that matched perfectly. It was, and still is, made by an Indonesian company called Seventh Creation, who operate on Etsy and via their own website. The straps cost half as much as the watch itself, but they look fabulous and are the sole reason for me buying the Pluto. I’ll be ordering one soon, and probably pick up a second strap with orange details to match the Jupiter MoonSwatch, too.
I’ve always been a firm believer that straps can make watches. I’ve written about the joy of straps before and I can’t wait to start experimenting with MoonSwatches.
But the Pluto’s strap also needs swapping out because, honestly, the stock option is fairly awful. I understand what Swatch is trying to do, in producing a Velcro strap reminiscent of those worn by Nasa astronauts with OMEGA Speedmasters on their wrist. “Flight-qualified by Nasa for all manned space missions,” and all that. But Swatch was clearly operating on a tight budget here and spent everything it could on the MoonSwatch case.
The result is a watch that looks almost identical to the Omega original, but with a strap that appears as if it fell not from Space, but from one of those sliding 2p machines in a seaside arcade.
Until the Seventh Creation strap arrives, I’ve swapped out the Mission to Pluto’s strap for a spare leather number I already owned. I’d bought it for my vintage Longines, but mistakenly ordered the wrong size. Thankfully it fits the MoonSwatch, and while it isn’t quite a match to the dark red tachymeter and sub-dials, the brown leather isn’t a million light years away, and it helps elevate the Swatch massively.
Was the MoonSwatch worth the wait? Truth be told, I should have tried harder to buy one sooner.
It’s a gorgeous timepiece; one of those watches I can’t stop looking at, whether I need to know the time or not. And despite being plastic (sorry, ‘bioceramic’), its shape feels exactly like the Omega Speedmaster I used to own. The edge of the tackymeter and the raised crystal feel especially faithful to the space-going original. It brings back fond memories of my first ‘proper’ watch, and I can’t really put a price on that. I wonder how the plastic crystal will hold up to daily use, and whether a tube of trusty Polywatch can remove scratches as it does so well with the Hesalite crystal of the Omega. Time will tell.
For now, I’m very happy with my purchase and I can’t wait to build up a small collection of MoonSwatches – complete with quality, colour-matched leather straps, originality be damned.