Welcome to Brand Breakdown, a series of comprehensive yet easy-to-digest guides to your favorite companies, with insights and information you won’t find on the average About page.
Fossil, an American-founded company, carried the generational baton from Timex in the horological relay race for market share. To reinforce the significance of Fossil in the marketplace, it’s best to let its competition do the talking: During Apple Events, the benchmark for Apple Watch sales is those of Rolex, The Swatch Group, and Fossil. Fossil continues to be relevant and should be in the conversation. Today, it remains one of the largest watch manufacturers in the world by volume, generating much of the Fossil Group’s $2 billion of annual revenue.
Fossil’s watch offerings vary from quartz to mechanical and from traditional to smartwatches, and can be found in almost every major department store for $100-300. The combination of availability, price accessibility, and variety of styles make Fossil’s watches ubiquitous, found on countless wrists around the world. If you’re overwhelmed by the sheer variety of the brand’s offerings, this guide should help you out.
Brand History
Fossil was founded in 1984 by American entrepreneur Tom Kartsotis, with their first watch made available to the public for sale by 1985, near the tail end of the Quartz Crisis. This period marked a time when upmarket European brands that produced mechanical watches had seen over a decade of declining sales as customers shifted buying preferences towards more affordable battery-powered timepieces. Fossil saw an opportunity and leveraged mid-century American watch aesthetics combined with low-cost overseas manufacturing and quartz movements. It was a hit.
Affordable quartz watches, such as Fossil, gained popularity in the mid-1980s — especially as they became a fixture in department stores’ jewelry sections. It took less than ten years for Fossil to reach $20 million in annual sales. To further disrupt the traditional watch industry, in 1990 Fossil began participating in the iconic watch and jewelry trade show Baselworld alongside traditional Swiss watch brands. Fossil’s highly stylized quartz timepiece offerings created a popular market by providing a less expensive alternative to luxury European timepieces.
