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The Brand Age

paulgraham.com · 7,731 words · saved by 12 readers

March 2026 In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time. The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirror all through the 1960s, and they'd been improving at an alarming rate. But even so the Swiss were surprised in 1968 when the Japanese swept all the top spots for mechanical watches at the Geneva Observatory trials. The Swiss knew what was coming. For years the Japanese had been able to make cheaper watches. Now they could make better ones too. To make matters worse, Swiss watches were about to become much more expensive. The Bretton Woods agreement, which since 1945 had fixed the exchange rates of most of the world's currencies, had set the Swiss Franc at an artificially low rate of .228 USD. When Bretton Woods collapsed in 1973, the Franc shot upward. By 1978 it reach

The Brand Age --> March 2026 In the early 1970s, disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time. The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirror all through the 1960s, and they'd been improving at an alarming rate. But even so the Swiss were surprised in 1968 when the Japanese swept all the top spots for mechanical watches at the Geneva Observatory trials. The Swiss knew what was coming. For years the Japanese

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