Timely Pieces : Offbeat Marketers of Wristwatches Bank on Vice President Dan Quayle and His Boss

Wristwatches were rather dull before Stephen Hill and Rick Ongstad came along.

True, there was a choice of sweep hand or digital, square or round, plain or Mickey, but none resembled anything like what these two former stockbrokers from Simi Valley have recently been marketing.

Take their Dan Quayle watch. Please. There’s Dan, hands in pants pockets, smiling his vice presidential smile, the two parts of his tie acting as the big and little hand. But the numbers are not in the traditional spots. They’re not even in any particular order. “Kind of reminds you of him, doesn’t it?” Ongstad asked.

While studying the Quayle timepiece, he pulls out two more designs; a George Bush watch that just happens to run backwards, and the just-released “Gorby the Ukrainian Cowboy” model that resembles a compass, complete with a small north at the top, south at the bottom and east on the right. In the middle is a smiling Gorbachev, surrounded by a sickle and a hammer turned into a pogo stick. To the left is a very big WEST.

Sitting side by side, munching on beef teriyaki at a Japanese restaurant, Hill and Ongstad, the co-owners of the Krazy Time Co., seem to have come from two different cultures. No, make that two different planets.

Hill, 28, is a mild-mannered, three-piece suit corporate type with a strong “Hi, how are ya?” handshake. His sport-shirted, disheveled, blond 40-year-old partner, on the other hand, looks like a fugitive from an Annette Funicello beach party movie.

“Steve stays at home with his family, mows the lawn and watches television and drinks beer,” Ongstad said. “I smoke, drink and chase women.”

“I don’t drink beer,” Hill said, “I sit out on the porch.”

“Whatever,” said Ongstad, who took one last puff on his cigarette after Hill urged him to put it out.

Hill and Ongstad may have different ways to conduct their personal lives, but professionally, they are of single purpose: to propel Krazy Time from the original wild idea they kicked around in the brokerage office to full-fledged, in-the-black reality.

“I couldn’t stand the business any more,” Ongstad said of brokering. “It was boring and mundane and I was unfulfilled.” While talking with Hill in the office one day, he noticed that some guy named Dan Quayle was running for vice president.

“We were reading about him in the newspapers and then the quotes started rolling out. He’s better than Spiro Agnew ever was.”

Emptying their bank accounts and encouraging friends to invest, the pair amassed $87,000 and went to a restaurant in Simi Valley. “Well, why not?” Ongstad said. “We had to do our marketing consulting somewhere, didn’t we?

“We’d go in and get people’s opinions; the customers, barmaids, bartenders, all the people we knew there.”

After receiving everyone’s input and relying on their own gut feelings, Hill and Ongstad had a professional artist do a rendering and placed an order for 5,000 Dan Quayles with a Hong Kong manufacturer.

“We put the numbers on the Dan Quayle watch in the wrong places,” Hill said, “because the guy is so confused it seems like every time he starts talking all the wrong stuff comes out.”

The watches showed up, but orders for them didn’t.

Ongstad got worried, so he had a “Get Your Dan Quayle Watch for Father’s Day” banner printed and took his Jeep and about 50 watches to Malibu Canyon and sat by the side of road waiting for the throngs of customers he knew would be there. He came home with 50 watches.

“We were sitting and yelling at each other,” Hill said. “We had this whole office filled with thousands of watches and I had sold two that day. Not 2,000, two watches. So we start scraping for customers. The first scary thing was our telephone bill; it was $3,600 a month. We were on the phone day and night, calling every newspaper in the United States.”

Then two things happened. The Associated Press picked up their story, and at the same time, Hill and Ongstad persuaded a small number of retail outlets to carry a few watches “just to see if they sell.”

What resulted, they said, was a pattern that has repeated itself ever since.

“A store buyer would reluctantly try 12,” Hill said, “then a few days later order 36, then a few days after that, a ton of them.” Currently shipping about 500 watches a month, the pair have sold more than 27,000 Quayle watches and 2,500 of the recently introduced George Bush model.

The Bush watch, Hill said, was supposed to be in stores by January, but trying to find a good watch movement that ran backward was a problem. (Hill says the only other backward watch ever on the market was one featuring Goofy.) So Krazy Time had one specially made.

For the month of May, they unveiled the Gorby the Ukrainian Cowboy watch, featuring a chain and extra large stem, “because everything Russian seems big, clumsy and heavy,” Ongstad said.

“We wanted a Russian watch with missiles and explosions,” he said, “but the politics kept changing. We noticed he was ‘Westernizing’ things, so our watch has him pointing that way. And we heard he liked Clint Eastwood movies, so we gave him a cowboy hat.” All three models, Quayle, Bush and Gorbachev, retail at $34.95.

Although Krazy Time is planning to market future caricature watches--Hill and Ongstad are mum on who will be next--they said they are trying to be careful to make each design original, clever and not offensive.

“Someone suggested a Pete Rose watch with playing cards instead of numbers,” Ongstad said, “but stuff like this has to be very funny and cute. You have to have a gut feeling that it is going to sell when you put it together.”

And now that Hill and Ongstad are entrepreneurs, watches are not the only items in their future. In the works is a George Bush bush--actually a potted plant known as a Texas privet. Purchasers’ names will be kept on a list, Hill said, and after five years, Krazy Time will contact everyone and announce a hedge-trimming contest. “The person who comes closest to George will win the grand prize.”