Almost a year after the introduction of the MoonSwatch collection from Swatch, the brand has launched another version (the twelfth so far) of its best-seller last night, the “Mission to Moonshine Gold” with a seconds hand made of recycled “Moonshine” gold. This slightly more expensive version was made available exclusively on Tuesday in Tokyo, Zürich, 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 “Mission to the Moon” with gold treatment.

Much to my surprise, at 5pm, there were only about 200 people in front of Bahnhofstrasse 30 (the building with a retail space of 7,435m2 was acquired 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. – I hadn?t gotten one of the previous watches and thought this would be a nice surprise give-away for one of our upcoming TimeOut events with our readers (I was thinking about something like ?if you can guess at what number in line I was, you?ll win the watch?). By 7 pm, the queue had doubled in length, and a couple of people also had met with existing groups in front of me. I would say there were around 250 people in front of me at this point, which meant there there definitely wasn’t a problem getting one....