Timex Group USA, Inc. (formerly known as Timex Corporation) is an American global watch manufacturing company founded in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 2008, the company was acquired by Timex Group B.V. and was renamed Timex Group USA.
Thomas Olsen purchased the Waterbury Clock Company in New York in 1941 and renamed it Timex, a portmanteau of the names of Time magazine and Kleenex.
History
Waterbury Clock Company (1854–1944)
Brass manufacturer Benedict & Burnham created Waterbury Clock Company in 1854 to manufacture clocks using brass wheels and gears. Waterbury Clock Company was legally incorporated on March 27, 1857, as an independent business with $60,000 in capital. The American clock industry was producing millions of clocks with scores of companies located in Connecticut's Naugatuck River Valley, earning the region the nickname "Switzerland of America". The Waterbury Clock Company was one of the largest producers for both domestic sales and export, primarily to Europe. In 1887, they introduced the large Jumbo pocket watch, invented by Archibald Bannatyne and named after the famous P. T. Barnum elephant.
Waterbury Watch Company
In 1877, a new prototype was introduced to Benedict and Burnham for an inexpensive pocket watch made of 58 parts, mostly punched sheet brass. They immediately set aside an unused portion of their machine shop and began producing the Long Wind at a rate of 200 per day by 1878. The department quickly outgrew its space in the plant, so Benedict & Burnham incorporated Waterbury Clock's sister company Waterbury Watch Company in 1880 with a capital of $400,000 to manufacture and sell inexpensive watches and other timepieces. Waterbury Watch started out very successfully in its early days, employing hundreds of women for their "slender fingers" and "delicate manipulation", and it became the largest-volume producer of watches in the world by 1888.
alt=Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'|thumb|A Timex Ironman watch
Waterbury Watch quickly fell into bankruptcy, however, due to poor sales techniques where "jobbers" and salesmen gave away much of the product as loss leaders with little regard to the company's future, thereby cheapening the products' perceived value.
In 1922, Waterbury Clock Company purchased the Robert H. Ingersoll & Bro. company for $1.5 million. The firm had gone bankrupt the previous year due to the post-war recession. However, Waterbury Clock was unable to deliver on Ingersoll's guarantee of quality in Europe due to the Great Depression, so they sold the London-based Ingersoll, Ltd. to its board of directors in 1930, making it a wholly British-owned enterprise. The Ingersoll brand name was continued in the United States by Waterbury Clock into the 1950s, while Ingersoll Ltd. produced the Ingersoll watch brand independently for the European and other markets.
Waterbury Clock Company regained its identity in the consumer market after the Great Depression and a period of hardship. They reached a license agreement with Walt Disney in 1930 to produce the famous Mickey Mouse watches and clocks under the Ingersoll brand name. They introduced the Mickey Mouse timepieces to the public at the Chicago World's Fair in June 1933, and they quickly became the company's first million-dollar line, saving it from financial disaster.
Thomas Olsen was the owner of Fred. Olsen Shipping Co., and he fled Norway in 1940 together with Joakim Lehmkuhl and their families because of the Nazi invasion. They eventually came to the United States seeking investments to assist in the war effort. Olsen and Lehmkuhl purchased controlling interest in Waterbury Clock Company in 1941, and Olsen became chairman. Olson appointed Lehmkuhl president, who had studied business and engineering at Harvard and MIT, and the company became the largest producer of fuse timers for precision defense products in the United States under his direction.-->
United States Time Corporation (1944–1969)
Sales declined after the Korean War in the 1950s because of diminishing defense orders, and United States Time president Lehmkuhl was convinced that an inexpensive watch would be a market success if it was both accurate and durable. He felt that low cost could be accomplished through the combination of automation, the precision tooling techniques used in making fuse timers, and a simpler design than that of higher-priced Swiss watches. Durability was accomplished through a new hard alloy called Armalloy, developed through wartime research. Armalloy was used to produce longwearing bearings, replacing the expensive jewels traditionally used in a watch's movement.
US Time Corporation bought Lacher & Co. AG in Pforzheim, Germany (the Laco brand), on February 1, 1959, in order to acquire the electric watch technology which that company had developed. They also purchased the DUROWE (Deutsche Uhrenrohwerke) brand. Timex sold Durowe to the Swiss movement manufacturer ETA SA on September 1, 1965.
Slogan: World's largest manufacturer of watches and mechanical time fuses
thumb|Navy [[RIM-2 Terrier|Terrier missile is controlled in flight through the stabilization system, provided by the U.S. Time–manufactured gyro]]
The company manufactured mechanical components for missiles during the boom of American missile development in the late 1950s, including fuses, gyroscope, accelerometers, guidance sub-system, and various other miniature precision items. The company promoted its products under the claim of being the "world's largest manufacturer of watches and mechanical time fuses."
The company also produced ammunition components, and repaired, installed, and reactivated government-owned production equipment. The height of the company's ordnance and ammunition business lasted through the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s, during which it operated Joliet Army Ammunition Plant as well as privately owned plants and storage facilities.
Slogan: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking
John Cameron Swayze was widely viewed as the most credible newsman in the United States, so Lehmkuhl decided to hire him as a company spokesman for live "torture tests" on television using Russ Alben's slogan "Timex – Takes a Licking and keeps on Ticking". Hirshon Garfield developed these commercials as elaborations on tests suggested by United States Time Corporation salesmen. The commercials included high-divers, water skiers, a dolphin, dishwashers, jackhammers, paint mixers, and the propeller of an outboard motor, each torturing a Timex watch.
Consumer demand increased for the watches, despite resistance from jewelers because of the low 50% markup, and Timex opened new distribution channels including department stores, cigar stands, drug stores, and other mass-market outlets.
Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid Corporation, contacted United States Time Corporation in 1948 in search of a manufacturer for his cameras. A strong relationship was forged between the companies in 1950 resulting in United States Time becoming the exclusive manufacturer of all Polaroid cameras worldwide through the 1970s, totaling more than 44 million cameras.
Timex Corporation (1969–2008)
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the American watch and clock industry was devastated by the arrival of cheap mechanical watches from the Far East, as well as the development of digital quartz watches pioneered by Japanese companies. Lehmkuhl retired in 1973 with no clear successor, and Polaroid ended its contract with Timex in 1975, resulting in a layoff of 2,000 employees.
In 1979, Timex purchased the former Telechron plants from General Electric, which acquired the Telechron company in 1943 when the latter's founder, Henry E. Warren, retired. Timex continued to produce the GE-branded synchronous electric clocks until the early to mid-1980s. In the mid-1980s, Timex abandoned its development of various consumer products and refocused efforts specifically on timepieces. Product quality and fashionable design became essential to success in the mass market. Timex had a solid reputation for durable products, and the company put increased efforts behind quality improvement. Longer battery life, more durable gold plating, greater accuracy, and more water-resistant styles were some of the many improvements that they implemented. They created new quartz analog movements using fewer components, reducing overall production time and costs. Timex and Disney reunited in 1993 to produce a new line of character watches called the Disney Classics Collection. Also in 1993, the Timex Factory at Dundee in the UK, was the site of a major industrial strike. In 1994, Timex acquired the Nautica Watches license and introduced Timex Data Link. The Data Link PDA-type watch could receive contact and scheduling information from a sequence in a computer monitor's light using software developed with Microsoft. They introduced the Timex Expedition brand in 1997, designed for rugged outdoor sports. Timex and Motorola introduced Beepwear in 1998, a watch with an integrated pager. Under its Callanen subsidiary, Timex acquired the watch license for urban fashion designer Marc Eckō in 2002. Timex USA's international holding company the Timex Group launched the TX Watch Company in late 2006. In 2007, Timex Group B.V. established Sequel AG as a separate company devoted to the design, manufacture, and distribution of the Guess and the Swiss-made Gc watch brands. Timex Group B.V. purchased the Italian design studio Giorgio Galli Design Lab in 2007. Since this change, Timex has introduced GPS enabled watches, heart rate monitor exercise watches, and similar devices.
In 2008, Timex Group USA signed a four-year agreement making Timex the first official timekeeper of the New York City Marathon. Meanwhile, parent company Timex Group B.V. launched Swiss-made luxury watch brands Salvatore Ferragamo Timepieces and Valentino Timeless under the Timex Group Luxury Watches business. That same year, they began construction on the second-largest ground-mounted solar array in the United States at Timex Group USA's headquarters in Middlebury, Connecticut. They inaugurated the 800-panel solar array on February 5, 2009, during a press event held at the headquarters. A few months later, Timex Group USA purchased the Marc Eckō watch trademark which it had licensed since 2002. The Callanen International business unit merged with the Timex Business Unit in 2009, bringing the Timex, Opex, TX, Nautica, and Marc Eckō brands under one company.
Timex Group B.V.
Timex Group B.V., a Dutch holding company, is the corporate parent of several watchmaking companies around the globe including Timex Group USA, Inc. Businesses and exclusive worldwide licenses include the Timex Business Unit (Timex, Timex Ironman, Opex, Nautica, Marc Eckō), Sequel (Guess, Gc), Timex Group Luxury Division (Versace, Versus, Salvatore Ferragamo, Vincent Bérard, CT Scuderia and Teslar) and Giorgio Galli Design Lab.