Watches for an Impulse

The United States Time Corp. of Middlebury, Conn., proudly boasts that one of its Timex watches recently swallowed by a Texas farmer's cow ran as good as new when the farmer retrieved it. Like the cow, U.S. jewelers know how it feels to swallow Timex. At first they opposed carrying Timex's low-cost, low-profit watches, but Timex is now the nation's fastest-selling timepiece. Since the first Timex was sold twelve years ago, Americans have bought 50 million of them and U.S. Time has become the world's largest watchmaker (1962 sales: $74.5 million). Last year one out of every three of the 23 million watches sold in the U.S. was a Timex. The company has become so cocksure about the attractions of its watches that it has just opened a plant in Besanc,on, France, just half an hour's ticking distance from the Swiss border, and hopes to take over a third of Common Market watch sales.

Frozen & Hammered. Timex has tapped the mass market for watches in much the same way as paperback publishers have for books. When jewelers spurned it because of its low 50% markup (100% for other watches), U.S. Time Sales Vice President Robert E. Mohr, 42, set up displays in drugstores, department stores and cigar stands, featuring a device that dunked a ticking watch into water and banged it with a hammer. The public really began to take notice when Mohr moved the torture test to television, shaking Timexes in automatic paint mixers, freezing them in blocks of ice, and tying them to plummeting high-divers.

Pricing its watches from $6.95 to $39.95 (for a battery-powered electric model), Timex ignored the notion of a watch as a lifetime gift and made it an impulse item. The company preaches that it is almost as cheap to buy a new Timex as to repair an old one, and urges consumers to build a wardrobe of different watch styles, as if watches were shoes. With Timex sales growing at twice the rate of the rest of the watch industry, it is a rare jeweler--and usually a "prestige" one with no need for the business--who is not hastening to set up Timex displays.

Simple Works. Timex was born after World War II, when U.S. Time's taciturn, Norwegian-born President and Chairman Joakim M. Lehmkuhl, 67, ordered his engineers to design a watch so simple that it could be geared for automatic production. The watch they produced is so uncomplicated that its works are mounted between two plates instead of a network of five as on other models, and have only four screws v. 31 in other watches. Timex's simplicity gives it amazing shockproof qualities, but most jewelers agree that, with its metal bearings, Timex will not keep time as faithfully as an expensive jewel-bearing watch. Lehmkuhl retorts that a Timex should run five years without cleaning, but U.S. Time has tacitly admitted that there is some ground for criticism by recently dropping two of its Armalloy metal bearings in favor of synthetic jewels in vital spots; the company had discovered that the bearings did not properly retain lubricating oil. The switch has not affected the cost of making Timex watches: the jewels cost Timex only 4-c- each.

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