Plastic Accents? Watch This!
Although not everyone remembers it, there was a time when buying a wristwatch meant choosing between a leather band and a metal band.
“Accessories used to be just something you stuck in your hair, or a little watch you put on your wrist,” said entrepreneur Mary Swan Lewis of Manhattan Beach.
She is the president of Chaos Holdings Inc., whose new collection of watches, clocks and sunglasses combines the energy of an MTV-youth culture with iMac-inspired pastel plastics and new technologies. “We have developed a really fun, fresh new brand for the young market,” said Lewis, 50. “We named it ‘Chaos’ because we want to upset the natural order of things.”
Both she and co-founder Walter Sims, 54, who is also CEO of the new company, have backgrounds in fashion, retail and manufacturing, including as executives at Swatch, the Swiss watch company that helped unleash the accessories explosion of the 1980s.
“I first saw Swatch in New York--it was colorful, all plastic with weird designs and one price point of $30,” said Lewis. “It was entirely different than what anybody else was doing.”
In fact, the concept was so new that when she went to work for the company and began calling on department stores, the stores didn’t know where to display the watches. “Everyone asked us, ‘Who’s going to buy this? Where do we put it, in the junior departments?’ ”
But the watches caught on immediately, and although critics suggested they were a passing fad, Swatch was able to keep the market alive, said Lewis. “We changed the collection constantly and made it fresh.”
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By advertising on MTV and sponsoring such youth-oriented sporting events as skateboarding and mountain biking, Swatch wooed and won the 8- to 18-year-old consumer. “We created the whole fashion watch department, and everybody jumped on the bandwagon,” said Lewis.
And now she and Sims hope that Chaos will have a similar appeal. “Swatch changed their design over the years and went to a more sophisticated, Italian design. They became more serious. Fossil and Guess have great stuff, but it’s mostly metal.”
The Chaos collection includes 27 watch styles in a medley of water-resistant, jellybean plastics with such whimsical names as CrawDaddy, Squidman, Seaweed, Pit Stop and Bungee.
“We wanted to put together a collection that would be fun and fresh and constantly changing,” said Lewis, a business school graduate of Cal State Long Beach. She comes up with the themes, then passes them on to their product designers scattered around the country.
“Our K-9 watch is the hottest item right now,” said Lewis. The $29 piece hangs around the neck like a dog tag and tells the date, time and the temperature as well as providing a mood-enhancing stainless steel worry bead. “It’s something like a pet you wear around the neck,” said Lewis.
And even though they were advised that “kids don’t care about quality,” she said, they shopped the major watch fairs and picked Japan’s Citizen Watch to make the innards because “they make sturdier metal movements without any plastic.”
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Similarly, with sunglasses, she said, “we went to Japan Optical and Yamamoto Kogaku, which makes all of the safety glasses for manufacturing companies, because we wanted a good frame.”
Lewis came up with Origami, a sunglass that folds into a little case worn around the neck. “Everyone just flipped,” she said. “You can see people staring at you when you open up the little pod and unfold the sunglasses.”
Folding eyeglasses are not new, she noted, but Chaos has added a patented hinge that allows the glasses to fold perfectly flat.
“We took some of the popular sizes and scaled them down so they are suitable for smaller faces,” said Lewis.
“It’s fun and silly. . . . We want parents to say ‘Gosh, I love this Chaos,’ ” said Lewis, who has a 6-year-old son.
Most items in the collection, which was introduced in March, cost between $29 and $50.
And even though Chaos is targeted at a young audience, (“Reinvent yourself one appendage at a time,” urges the Web site at https://www.chaosmania.com), “What we’re seeing at the counter is customers from 8 to 80,” she said.
At Watch World International, a New York-based national retail chain, merchandiser Melissa Berardi says Chaos is “picking up the people the Swatch group has lost.” “The watches are a little more wild and a little more cutting-edge, and our customers love them--we’ve even sold them for bridal parties,” she said. “They may have targeted teenagers, but we’re selling them to customers from 13 to 40. And their ad campaign is adorable. The K-9 is the No. 1 selling unit in our summer catalog.”
