About that, I was wrong on two counts. The Swatch Automatic, an $85 plastic watch with an ETA automatic movement, appeared in 1991, not 1990. Secondly, the mechanical did not move down market. Nor was that SMH CEO Nicolas G. Hayek, Sr.’s intention when he launched it. At the time, Hayek said he did it for the many third-world markets where quartz watches were still rare due to the limited availability of watch batteries. The real reason, he told me later, is that he wanted to boost production of hairsprings at SMH’S Nivarox, which was the sole hairspring supplier to the industry. Mechanical watch quantities in 1990 were still very small, not quite 2 million pieces. If the mechanical was coming back, Hayek, ever the industrialist, wanted higher volumes and a better economy of scale for this most crucial of movement parts. Either way, an automatic Swatch was a good omen for mechanicals.