How Timex has sold $1 watches for 170 years

Buffy Acacia

Timex isn’t usually a brand to make headlines. For decades, it’s felt like the quintessential watch brand next door who you’d turn to for any watch that’s as well-built as it is affordable. Between the simple dials, luxury homages, and digital sports watches, Timex does it all and it does it cheaper than most. However, Timex had its own internet-breaking moment recently when it announced the sale of 1,000 Waterbury watches for just $1. Beyond generosity, why would Timex do that? Well, it goes way back into the history of the company, long before the name Timex had come about.

The origins

Timex’s Waterbury collection is a tribute to the Waterbury Clock Company, which is essentially where its history begins. Initially founded in 1854 by a manufacturer of brass called Benedict & Burnham, Waterbury Clock Company made, you guessed it, clocks from brass components. However, the whole Naugatuck River Valley in Connecticut was figuratively flooded with clock and watchmakers, capitalising on the emerging trends of the general public carrying pocket watches. Still, Waterbury Clock Company managed to be one of the top producers with huge sales numbers both in America and exports to Europe.

By the mid 1870s, it was clear that watches were selling far more than clocks. Benedict & Burnham (separately to Waterbury Clock Co. who also made pocket watches) started producing a watch called the Long Wind which could be made from just 58 parts, and mostly out of inexpensive sheet brass. By 1878, production had grown to 200 watches per day, and in 1880 the Waterbury Watch Company was created as a sister to the Clock Company. That train of success kept rolling, and Waterbury Watch Co. made more watches than anyone else in the world in 1888. However, things took a sharp turn for the worse. It turned out that Waterbury Watch Co. salesmen were practically giving the watches away to drive greater interest in the brand, but it wound up cheapening the perception of those watches and causing horrible losses. The company tried to scrape its reputation back by making higher-end pieces, but the damage was done, and it fell into receivership by 1912.

Waterbury meets Ingersoll

Although the rise and fall of Waterbury Watch Co. was sudden and dramatic, things at the original Waterbury Clock Co. were running smoothly. It had begun making mail order watches for Ingersoll in 1892, leading to the 1896 release of the Ingersoll Yankee. That was the first watch to cost a nice, round dollar, and it even earned the catchphrase “the watch that made the dollar famous” because of its popularity. In 1899, Waterbury Watch Co. was manufacturing 8,000 dollar watches per day. A little over a decade later, that number had grown to nearly 9,600. In 20 years of being available, Ingersoll had sold nearly 40 million. This symbiotic partnership would continue to grow and entwine the Waterbury and Ingersoll businesses, especially after Ingersoll purchased the old Waterbury Watch Co. factory in 1914 for its own manufacturing.

In 1914, the First World War began. From a business standpoint, it brought opportunity. Wristwatches were in mass demand for the first time in history, and Waterbury Clock Co. modified its smaller pocket watches for women with lugs for straps and 3 o’clock crowns. It also added luminous hands with the use of dangerous radium for nighttime legibility. This did wonders for Waterbury Clock Co. but Ingersoll struggled greatly in the recession after the war, and went bankrupt in 1922. Waterbury Clock Co. purchased the remnants of Ingersoll, sold its London bases to its British board of directors, which split the brand into the European Ingersoll Ltd. and the American Ingersoll-Waterbury.

Disney defeating the Depression

Waterbury Clock Co. had deftly weathered the post-war recession, but the Great Depression loomed in 1929. It’s solution? A licensing agreement with Walt Disney to put America’s most beloved mouse on a watch dial. Branded as Ingersoll for its cachet, the Mickey Mouse watches were incredibly popular despite the worst economic crash ever recorded. First released to the public at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, over 5 million watches were made during its first 15 years. It’s safe to say that Mickey Mouse single-handedly saved Waterbury Clock Co. from the Great Depression.

Norwegian ownership

In 1940, two Norwegian businessmen had fled to America with their families to escape the Nazi invasion. Thomas Olsen was a wealthy man having vastly expanded his father’s shipping business with his brother Rudolf, and he was looking for a wartime investment. Together with Joakim Lehmkuhl, another Norwegian from a powerful political family, the two purchased a controlling share of Waterbury Clock Company. With Olsen as chairman and Lehmkuhl as president, a new manufacturing plant was built in Middlebury, Connecticut in 1942, where the company’s headquarters remains today. Its main purpose was not actually making wristwatches for soldiers, but making fuse timers for the defence industry, for which it was the largest producer in the United States. In 1943 it was awarded the Army-Navy “E” Award for excellence in production by the Under-Secretary of War. It was clear that the company had surpassed its humble origins as a clockmaker in Waterbury, and after a shareholder vote, the name was changed to United States Time Corporation in 1944.

Hello Timex

Soon, the Timex name popped up on a small run of nurse’s watches and a few select print magazine adverts. According to Thomas Olsen’s son during a 2015 interview, the Timex name was simply based on things that Olsen was fond of. At that moment, it was Time magazine and Kleenex tissues. The name must have stuck around in his head. Once the demand for fuses dropped during the Korean War, United States Time Corporation put more effort into making watches again. The Ingersoll name was now strongly associated with Disney watches, so Timex was chosen for a new collection in 1950. Timex watches were a storming success with an emphasis on smart-looking designs that could still be worn casually, and zero jewell movements that kept costs way down. It’s estimated that by 1962, a third of all wristwatches sold in the US were Timex.

Takes a licking and keeps on ticking

A true legend was born in the 1960s, and that was the Timex Marlin. Named for its water resistance, the Marlin was initially released in the ‘50s, but found its style in the ‘60s. It was promoted by one of America’s most famous and trusted newsmen, John Cameron Swayze. Ad campaigns showed the Marlin getting caught mid-air by leaping dolphins and free-falling on the wrists of cliff divers in Mexico’s Acapulco cliffs. But, it was Swayze placing a Timex that had been pre-frozen in a block of ice into a blender and then coming out keeping time which really sold customers. The phrase “Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking” entered social consciousness, and never left. Eventually, United States Time Corporation entered its final form as Timex Corporation in July, 1969.

Just as Timex solidified its brand identity, a not-so-little brand named Seiko initiated the Quartz Crisis with the release of the Quartz Astron. Efforts in making electric watches had been a bust, and the competition grew year on year. Joakim Lehmkuhl retired in 1973, which was a shock to the Timex ecosystem in itself. While watch sales plummeted, the company had managed to keep some income through other industries. For example, Timex manufactured Polaroid cameras up until 1975, totalling more than 44 million cameras. However, it wasn’t enough. The Disney contract came to a close, and even John Cameron Swayze retired. 30,000 Timex employees became 6,000 as offices and factories closed. Again, Timex even made a computer called the Timex Sinclair, but they couldn’t compete with the likes of IBM, Texas Instruments and GE.

The Timex Ironman and Indiglo

Although the ‘70s and early ‘80s were definitely a monumental struggle, Timex managed to keep its doors open. It was the mid ‘80s when the company gave up on its consumer electronics and decided once again to focus on watches. It now had access to solid quartz and digital movements, and made efforts to improve accuracy, durability of gold plating, and water resistance. Timex had sponsored several sporting events and even collaborated with athletes to design specific sports watches, and the most successful of these was the Timex Ironman. Mario Sabatini, Timex’s digital product manager, was flown out to Hawaii for the 1984 Ironman Triathlon with 1,500 Timex Triathlon watches to sell for $35.95 ($109.10 today after inflation) each. He sold them all, validating a $20 million ad campaign with more Timex watches subjected to torture tests.

There’s no hiding that the Timex Triathlon was very much in the same vein of durable sports watches as the Casio G-Shock that came out in 1983, however Timex’s American sensibilities had a lot of mass appeal, plus it was more strongly aligned with health and fitness. Initially sold as the Timex Triathlon and expanded into the Timex Ironman in 1986, it had 100m of water resistance, a legible LCD screen, and attractive blue and orange highlights. Up until 1992, the range remained consistent with high sales numbers, and then a new development called Indiglo arrived. Rather than an LED backlight which only poorly lit the dial from one corner, Indiglo placed an electroluminescent panel behind the entire dial, lighting it up evenly in a blue or green colour. Over the next few decades the Ironman was developed across thousands of references, and it remains Timex’s best selling collection. However, the craziest part of Indiglo was that it could work on analogue watch dials too.

Corporate expansion and restructuring

In 1993, Timex’s Indiglo received a huge sales boost due to quite a grim story. After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, a story circulated that an office worker had guided a group of people to safety using their Indiglo down a dark flight of stairs. The mid-to-late ‘90s and early ‘00s was an incredibly productive period for Timex as a corporation, as it developed new technologies for business and purchased other fashion-related subsidiaries, becoming the watchmakers for brands such as Nautica, Guess, and Versace. By the time the Global Financial Crisis came around, Timex Corporation was behemoth enough to weather the storm. If anything, its earning potential was only limited by the complexity of the business’ organisation. A 2008 restructuring saw to that, more clearly defining the roles of upper management and cleaning up its internal competition.

Present day

This is where the Timex of then catches up to the Timex of today. It’s a brand of such enormous and incomprehensible size that summing up all of its releases would be impossible, but there are definitely some highlights. The mechanical Timex Marlin was reissued in 2017 and has been a cult hit with vintage watch enthusiasts, mainly thanks to its smooth ‘60s looks and manually-wound Chinese movement. Almost all of Timex’s watches have been made outside of America since 2001, but it was a necessary move to keep the low prices the brand is synonymous with. The Easy Reader has been in production since 1977, and is one of the most popular analogue watches in the world. The Timex Q also hopped on 1970s trendiness with solid value for money. The recent $1 release of the Timex Waterbury is a perfect celebration of the brand’s evolution, and how it has stayed afloat throughout two centuries of hardships.