Cast your mind back to 2017. In those heady days before ChatGPT and DALL-E, and Zoom calls, Swatch launched a fancy online platform that let you, the watch-buying public, design your own Swatch watch. Well, not exactly design. More like customize.
It was called Swatch x You, and it let you tweak Swatch’s standard New Gent 41-mm model by selecting one of the (surprisingly limited) preset designs, which you could then move, zoom, and rotate to fit over the watch and strap. You could also add in a chip for NFC payments, and, as a final flourish, put a very short personal message on the case back (to a maximum of 15 characters).
As you can tell, although a fun idea, this offering was never designed to be anything near approaching bespoke. From tomorrow, however, the MoonSwatch maker is taking its Swatch x You model and giving it an artificial intelligence makeover.
Dubbed AI‑DADA, Swatch says this AI-powered design tool lets you create entirely unique watches starting from a blank canvas and using only your imagination as a guide to the final outcome. After logging into your Swatch account, you prompt AI‑DADA with your own idea, then, in less than two minutes, a “unique watch design comes to life.” To underline this uniqueness, each AI‑DADA watch carries a “1/1” sign on its case back.
This Swatch and Bathing Ape collaboration is part of the work now in at AI-DADA dataset.
Photograph: Jeremy White
And, just as with Swatch x You, it’s possible to further customize the watch by choosing indexes or selecting the color of its mechanism. To save on data center power drains and rampant creativity run amuck, you’re only allowed three prompts per day on AI‑DADA, something that Swatch is spinning as a “creative challenge that makes every attempt feel special.”
Ultimately, what we have here is a new version of Swatch x You that has been plugged with image-generation software supplied by OpenAI, thus letting the general public emblazon its timepieces with whatever graphics they see fit to dream up and deposit on them. What could possibly go wrong here, I wonder?
I asked Roberto Amico, Swatch’s global head of digital, what guardrails have been put in place to stop people making, say, their very own Jeffrey Epstein Swatch, or White Power Swatch, or Stormy Daniels Swatch. Or maybe a Swatch with a Rolex logo on it, or something that looks a lot like the Rolex logo.
Amico reassures me Swatch has indeed set guardrails, particularly with logos, for example, alongside the certain restrictions already in place from OpenAI. But interestingly, Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek Jr. tells me he battled with OpenAI to remove some of its existing guardrails to make AI‑DADA “more liberal, more Swatch.”
Hayek also confessed at the launch event in Switzerland that his first prompts on AI‑DADA all concerned “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” but he was told his own model wouldn’t allow it. Still, you can never underestimate the ingenuity of the general public to get around obvious red flags—such as a ban on the model reproducing nudity or religious iconography—and create something that Swatch might not want to be associated with. Time will tell how bulletproof this model truly is.
Familiar Faces
While Swatch’s image model may be based on OpenAI, it defaults to a data set of more than 40 years of Swatch watches, products, designs, art, and street paintings. Like a pattern or color on a particular 1980s Swatch dial or strap? It’s in there. Have a fondness for a Keith Haring or Vivienne Westwood or Phil Collins collaboration, the model has this too. If you ask for a design inspired by something outside of what Swatch has collected together in this archive, only then, Amico tells me, does AI‑DADA go beyond the in-house dataset and mine OpenAI’s data.
Courtesy of: Swatch
Swatch will own all the designs created, and also the data from all the customer submissions too—but it says this data will be anonymized. Impressively, the time from the point you say yes to your individual design to delivery will supposedly be just two to five days, depending on where you are in the world.
Potential personalization pitfalls aside, the real major disappointment for this AI-DADA launch is that, just as before with Swatch x You, right now the only watch model you can “design” using the platform is a New Gent. This is very much not what the internet community was hoping for. They wanted to make their own MoonSwatches.
Swatch is fully aware of this clamoring from those who bought into what is undoubtedly still the watch world’s biggest success story in recent memory, one that shook up the industry as well as preconceived notions of luxury watchmaking.
But, sadly, personalized MoonSwatches was always going to be an unlikely offering. Here’s why.
The MoonSwatch manufacturing process is complex and distributed. To make the bioceramic parts (the monobloc case, pushers and crown, battery cover, and loop on the Velcro bracelet), the raw ingredients—castor oil polymer, zirconium oxide powder, chemical pigments—are fed into an extrusion machine, which combines them at 200 degrees Celsius. From this, spaghetti-like strings of bioceramic emerge, which are then granulized, ready for injection molding. The powder and pigments are made separately by Swatch Group subsidiaries, as are the watch movements.
Even though every element of the process, all the way to final assembly is completely automated, Swatch, which makes more than 3 million watches a year, has not been able to keep up with demand for “vanilla” MoonSwatches across its 100-plus brick-and-mortar locations worldwide. And now it sells some of them online, too. But it’s that extrusion process that’s the manufacturing bottleneck, and where Swatch has invested in new machines to clear the physical queues outside stores and the backlog of customer interest.
AI-DADA prompt: “WIRED meets Keith Haring and goes for a coffee.” This is the watch design the model created for us, and it can never be replicated.
Photograph: Jeremy White
This being the case, it’s hard to see how such an intricate production line, combining elements from multiple companies and locations within the Swatch world, would be able to start producing truly bespoke, personalized MoonSwatches where each individual piece is unlike any other.
However, all is not lost. Hayek exclusively tells me there is hope for customized MoonSwatches in the future. “I’m also not excluding anything. We will see when we have a lot of requests from consumers, because we listen to consumers,” he says. “We had a success [with MoonSwatch] and we are always thinking further—and there might be this way to reflect it also. I will not exclude. Because it’s all our own companies, there’s no problem.” Hayek is prepared to confirm that other Swatch models will in the future be added to the AI-DADA offering, along with the launch style of New Gent.
Want to try it for yourself? Much like with the MoonSwatch launch, it looks like you will have to be patient. The AI-DADA tool on Swatch.com will be available in Switzerland only from November 21, with a customized New Gent costing ₣170 (around $210)—cheap, but considerably more expensive than its off-the-peg base model, which costs around $95.
More countries are supposedly following “soon,” and eventually worldwide. In the meantime, you can think about what design you might ask the AI to create—and continue daydreaming about your very own unique 1/1 MoonSwatch.
