{"id":23932,"date":"2023-03-08T19:58:04","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T00:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.watchtime.com\/wristwatch-industry-news\/buying-the-moonshine-gold-moonswatch\/"},"modified":"2023-03-08T19:58:04","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T00:58:04","slug":"i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one\/","title":{"rendered":"I Stood in Line for a Moonshine Gold MoonSwatch. And Didn\u2019t Buy One."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Almost a year after the introduction of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.watchtime.com\/wristwatch-industry-news\/meet-the-moonswatch-omega-and-swatch-join-forces-for-a-new-collection\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"137348\">MoonSwatch collection from Swatch<\/a>, the brand has launched another version (the twelfth so far) of its best-seller last night, the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.watchtime.com\/wristwatch-industry-news\/swatch-x-omega-launches-moonswatch-mission-to-moonshine-gold\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"147387\">Mission to Moonshine Gold<\/a>\u201d with a seconds hand made of recycled \u201cMoonshine\u201d gold. This slightly more expensive version was made available exclusively on Tuesday in Tokyo, Z\u00fcrich, Milan, and London, and went on sale at 7pm local time. I had picked Zurich as my closest location, since I wanted to see and document (again) how many people had queued up for this special version of the \u201cMission to the Moon\u201d with gold treatment. <\/p>\n<p>Much to my surprise, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/Cpfm4SLgbgW\/\" target=\"_blank\">at 5pm, there were only about 200 people in front of Bahnhofstrasse 30<\/a> (the building with a retail space of 7,435m2 was <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swatchgroup.com\/en\/services\/archive\/2014\/group-acquires-prestigious-building-zurich\" target=\"_blank\">acquired<\/a> by Swatch Group in 2014 and served as a pop-up store last night). As a result, I spontaneously decided to not just be a journalist for once, but instead wait as a customer as well. \u2013 I hadn\u2019t gotten one of the previous watches and thought this would be a nice surprise give-away for one of our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.watchtimeevents.com\/featured-events\">upcoming TimeOut events<\/a> with our readers (I was thinking about something like \u201cif you can guess at what number in line I was, you\u2019ll win the watch\u201d). By 7 pm, the queue had doubled in length, and a couple of people also had joined existing groups in front of me. I would say there were around 250 people in front of me at this point, which meant there definitely wasn\u2019t a problem getting one. \u2013 After all, Swatch Group knew exactly how much demand there was, and decided to create an even bigger buzz with choosing only four locations, and a very small time-frame this time. But, much to my surprise, the sales process turned out to be glacially slow: after three hours, we had finally made it to the corner of the building. It was 3\u00b0C (37.4 Fahrenheit) outside, I was miserable, cold, and most of all late. At 10pm, I gave up and went home. The store\u2019s entrance was in sight at this point, but there was no way to predict if it would have taken another hour, or two to finally get there. In short, I realized I wasn\u2019t up for a \u201cMission to Hypothermia,\u201d and also that being a watch journalist was more than enough. At least I briefly got to see my colleague <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fratellowatches.com\/an-evening-in-zurich-observing-the-moonswatch-crowd\/\" target=\"_blank\">Robert-Jan Broer from Fratello<\/a> who also covered the event in Zurich.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img data-interchange=\"[https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one.jpg, (default)],[https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one-5.jpg, (small)],[https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one-4.jpg, (medium)]\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1366\" height=\"768\" data-old-src=\"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/i-stood-in-line-for-a-moonshine-gold-moonswatch-and-didnt-buy-one.jpg\" alt class=\"wp-image-147398\"><figcaption>600 feet in three hours \u2013 waiting in line for a MoonSwatch \u201cMission to Moonshine Gold\u201d required a lot of patience. And warm clothes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I have said this before: the MoonSwatch was and is a stroke of genius, and I cannot stress out enough what this incredibly bold product has done for the industry as a whole. But I still can\u2019t wrap my head around why there weren\u2019t, for example, any additional crew members outside last night to help with credit card payments, so that buyers would only have to pick up their watches, once inside. Or why Swatch just didn\u2019t bring more staff and cash registers to the event (only five customers were allowed in at a time). \u2013 Don\u2019t get me wrong, the collective experience of waiting in line for a product that hot is fun to a certain point, and certainly a welcome PR opportunity for the brand, but the buying experience after the official start of the event could have been managed much more efficiently, especially after having already sold more than one million MoonSwatches last year.<\/p>\n<p>Follow <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swatch.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this link<\/a> if you want to learn more about the MoonSwatch.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.watchtime.com\/wristwatch-industry-news\/buying-the-moonshine-gold-moonswatch\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost a year after the introduction of the MoonSwatch collection from Swatch, the brand has&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1107,1108],"tags":[1111,1112,1113],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pureluxurymag.com\/watchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}