Watchmakers Swatch and Blancpain released their collaborative collection on Saturday (9 Sep).
Queues began to form outside the Swatch boutiques at ION Orchard and The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands from the day before.
Following the chaos that was the Swatch-Omega launch last year, the brand has employed crowd management measures to ensure a repeat does not happen.
With the help of security personnel and crowd tagging, the orderly queues and calm crowd this year are a stark difference from last year’s situation, shoppers said.
Swatch announced the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms Collection with Blancpain on Thursday (7 Sep), which was available in stores worldwide two days later.
In Singapore, the watches are available at ION Orchard and The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands.
According to Lianhe Zaobao, the sale of the collection started at 10am on Saturday (9 Sep). Each customer can only buy up to one timepiece, which retails for S$565.
The Chinese language paper reported that the ION Orchard store saw a queue of about 300 people at 9am.
As the shop is in basement two of the mall, security personnel started putting up queue areas the night before. There were already people in the queue from 10pm on Friday (8 Sep).
Source: Lianhe Zaobao
As 10am rolled around on Saturday, staff members distributed wrist tags to those in queue. Then, they escorted the shoppers down to the store in groups.
Source: @zaobaosg on Instagram
The whole process was orderly, and there were no incidents of shoving or overcrowding, reported Zaobao.
48-year-old Hu Xuyao (transliterated from Mandarin) was third in line at the Orchard store. He told the paper that he started queuing at 10pm on Friday, and there were already security personnel at the site.
Impressively, the security allowed those in the queue to freely move about. Mr Hu said he was even able to go back to his car to take a nap before rejoining his place in line at 5am on Saturday.
“There were more people in the morning, but the situation was better than last year. Even in the shop, people were making their purchases one by one.”
Source: @zaobaosg on Instagram
21-year-old Wu Tan An (transliterated from Mandarin) had wanted to purchase the Swatch-Omega line last year. However, he gave up after seeing the queues.
“This year, the queues are orderly, and the purchase process was quick as well.”
In March 2022, Swatch and Omega released their MoonSwatch line. ION Orchard and The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands stores saw huge crowds that got out of control, resulting in heated exchanges.
At one point, a person in the queue even taunted police at the scene to shoot him.
The situation was so chaotic that the Swatch brand manager at the time walked out after failed attempts at appeasing the crowd.
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Featured image adapted from Lianhe Zaobao and @zaobao on Instagram.
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