Timex Announces £1 Watch
Imagine bearing such a strong resemblance to Mr Burns off The Simpsons – both physically and in the way you conduct business – that Matt Groening is asked to issue a statement to the effect that any similarity between the two is purely coincidental.
That’s what happened to Scandinavian billionaire Fred Olsen, who is 95 today and known as “the Norwegian Howard Hughes”, on account of his vast wealth and avoidance of publicity.
Olsen doesn’t need to be compared to fictional characters – his life has been fantastic enough as it is.
He ran off to sea shortly after his 20th birthday, led the first Norwegian group to drill for oil in the North Sea, formed his country’s first private oil company, and helped make it one of the richest nations on Earth.
In the 1990s Olsen pivoted to renewable energy, with his companies now being the largest independent supplier of wind electricity to Britain.
Before that he has been credited with “practically [creating] the sports watch category” in the 1980s via the Timex’s Ironman watch. Timex’s Indiglo Night-Light technology, a boon to any schoolkid who grew up in the mid-1990s, was another one of his.
Fred Olsen & Co. controlled and ran Timex Group up until very recently (since 2020 it has been in the hands of private equity), and it is his family we have to thank for the company existing at all.
The name Timex was coined by Thomas Olsen – Fred’s dad – who had a penchant for snappy brand names and improbably fused Time and Kleenex together to name his own.
“My father always loved to noodle with words. He liked to read Time magazine, and he used a lot of Kleenex, so he put the two names together and got Timex,” Fred explained in 2015.
Olsen Snr was also no slouch when it came to business – his wealth was such that he owned more than 30 paintings by Edvard Munch, including one of four versions of The Scream, a haul he hid from the Nazis in a Norwegian hay barn during World War II.
In 1941, Thomas Olsen purchased a majority interest in the Waterbury Clock Company, which had been founded in 1854 in Waterbury, Connecticut, for $500,000, which was then supplying bomb fuses to the British government.
A few years later he rechristened the company Timex.
The Waterbury Clock Company had already left its mark on history. In the 19th Century it was a big supplier of free-standing and mantle clocks that ran on brass wheels and gears.
That business, along with similar neighbouring ones, was so successful that Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley region earned the nickname the “Switzerland of America”.
The race was soon on to democratise time, with various attempts beginning in the 1870s to produce a pocket watch that could be sold as cheaply as possible – for a few dollars, or less.
Waterbury won that race in 1896 when the Ingersoll Watch Company began selling one of its clocks in a watch case for $1.
Christened “the Yankee” it became known as “the watch that made the dollar famous”, with significant applications for train conductors relying on it for punctuality, factory workers synchronising their breaks and farmers checking it for harvests.
This year marks the 170th year of the Waterbury Clock Company being founded, an anniversary Timex is claiming.
To do so, it is putting the $1 watch – reimagined for the wrist, and available for £1 in the UK – back into circulation.
The time, day and date model comes with a ice-white dial, lacquered Roman numerals and heavily emblazoned with ‘170th Anniversary’ notices on the dial and case back.
“It just became a no-brainer, and really fun when we started talking about it,” Shari Fabiani, CMO of Timex Group tells Esquire, from the US.
“We wanted all these bells and whistles on [an anniversary watch] and then it was, like, ‘How much should we charge? We said to our CEO ‘Please don’t kill us… but it should be $1’. Because that was the story.”
Fabiani draws parallels between the Westbury Clock Company and Timex’s mission today.
“The DNA of Timex is all about being really accessible and making high-quality products for everyone, that really democratise timekeeping,” she says.
“It came out of a time when the only way of keeping time was on mantle clocks. These were hand-carved out of wood. So, as you can imagine, they were super-expensive, there weren’t a lot of them out there, and it was really for the one per cent.”
“After that, we went from the mantles to the pocket. So everyday people around the world could have that pocket watch and keep time and do things that they weren’t able to easily do, prior to that. And despite the intricacies of making a pocket watch, it was $1.”
Obviously $1 sounds like a bargain today. Was that the case in 1896?
“It’s [the equivalent of] about $35 today,” says Fabiani. “So, it wasn’t nothing. But it was still affordable. We even had Mark Twain writing to us, enclosing his dollar.”
The 2024 tribute watch has been reimagined in Timex’s Design Lab in Milan, where it was overseen by Giorgio Galli.
“We thought a [tribute] pocket watch could be interesting,” Fabiani says. “But, being more consumer-driven, we took cues from [the original] and made it for the wrist. We always say the Timex journey is ‘from the mantles to the pocket to the wrist’”.
Clearly Timex will be making a loss on each of the $1/£1 watches sold today. Although, given the PR value around the idea, you wonder how they arrived at the figures of producing just 1,000 watches.
Wouldn’t doing, say, a million, have arguably been even cooler?
“You know, in the world of ‘drops’, sometimes even 1,000 is a lot. In the sneaker world, they’re even tighter that that. But yeah, there were conversations [to do more],” Fabiani says.
“And of course there’s going to be a halo effect around the brand. But for us, as a heritage brand, it’s really about honouring the past, as well as embracing the future.”
“And we’re not done for this year yet,” she says. “We have many more exciting drops to come.”
The Limited Edition $1/£1 watch is available online from timex.co.uk and in-store at Frasers Meadowhall
You Might Also Like
