Aussies camp overnight at Sydney mall for release of Swatch X Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms watch

Aussies armed with sleeping bags and tents camped in Sydney’s CBD overnight in a desperate bid to beat enormous queues for one surprising item.

Queues outside Sydney’s Pitt St Mall. Picture: Twitter/@jimmygunawanapp

Photos and videos have emerged online of keen consumers lining up outside a Sydney mall overnight to get their hands on a much-anticipated new watch.

“No mucking around in Sydney. Queues formed just after 6pm,” read the caption alongside a photo posted to Facebook which showed people lined up in camping chairs along Sydney’s Pitt St mall entrance.

The queues were for the new Swatch X Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms watch, released from Saturday morning at Swatch stores in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

The swanky accessory comes with a $650 price tag, according to the Swatch website.

One post published on the Facebook group “Blancpain x Swatch Australia” at 6pm asked when people were starting to line up at Pitt St, to which someone responded: “pretty much when you posted”.

Guess what they are queuing? #swatchpic.twitter.com/149z4kLRh8

— BLENDER SUSHI 🫶 X - AI Prophet 24/7 Blenderian (@jimmygunawanapp) September 8, 2023

That meant peopl lined up for a whopping 15 hours, as Swatch Pitt St opened 9am Saturday.

Other social media and chat platforms, including Reddit and Twitter, showed photos and footage of the long lines stretching back multiple stores.

On its website, Swatch boasts that the new Swatch X Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms “honors the first true diver’s watch: the Fifty Fathoms”.

The queues are understood to have started at 6pm Friday. Picture: Facebook

“Created 70 years ago by a passionate scuba diver, it revolutionised watchmaking by becoming the first timepiece that successfully met all the needs of underwater exploration,” it continued.

The five mechanical watches in the collection “reproduce all the hallmarks of this Swiss watchmaking icon while referencing our own diving watch line, the SCUBA,” the description read.

“Drawing inspiration from the deep seas, each model celebrates one of the five oceans and the magnificent, colourful animals known as nudibranchs, that dwell in their depths”.

While all the hype might be enough for some people to sacrifice their Friday nights to wait in queues, that wasn’t the case for others.

Dozens of people appeared to camp overnight. Picture: Reddit

One person wrote on Reddit: “Man, I get excited for some stuff coming out, but never wait in a line on the first day excited”.

“Between JD and swatch and even that BTS store every commute to work for me now seems to include walking past lines and lines of resellers and hypebeasts”.

It’s not the first time the release of a watch line has attracted such interest.

In March last year, police were called to Westfield Sydney in a bid to assist security with crowd control over the release of the limited edition Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch.

The new watch was released on Saturday morning. Picture: Twitter/@jimmygunawanapp

Thousands of people flooded shopping centres in Sydney and Melbourne at the crack of dawn to try to score one of the rare watches limited-edition watch.

At the time, Melbourne journalist Luke Dennehy wrote on Twitter: “The Swatch shop probably holds five customers at the most. Will be an interesting day.”

The non-limited Swatch X Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms collection was restricted to one watch purchase per person per store and day, the Swatch website read.

Originally published as Aussies camp overnight at Sydney mall for release of Swatch X Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms watch