Club Fossil? A predecessor to Fossil Collector's Club - yes, yes it is

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If you've ever bought or looked at an early (and I mean early) Fossil tin you may have noticed something on the back of it called "Club Fossil" I never really paid much attention to it until I came across the following brochure for Fossil swag marketed as Club Fossil. Lots of the content in the brochure is around how Club Fossil members can get access to Fossil stuff first -- no indication of exclusivity or membership plans.

Few things of interest for me are the Dirtmaster watches and Airplane Watch SK-5038 which has always been listed as one of the first Limited Edition watches, but yet the Car Watch SK-5037 isn't on any of my checklists.

Enjoy and if you know anything about Club Fossil please reach out!

Some well needed updates and new Fossil Limited Edition Checklist

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First of all, Happy Autumn! It's been a busy few months and I want to thank some of you for reaching out to me -- great to see passion and interest with our little site and also being envious of some of your finds. I've been going through my Fossil stuff and created a list of topics to talk about and I WILL be more active on the site, forum and Facebook page during the fall and winter months. Once the weather turns here in the great Northeast, the bikes, the kids toys and my 1958 Chevy go into storage and we begin the hibernation process until April. It's really a great time of year (until it snows).

Anyways onto the updates.

I've updated the Fossil Defender guide with some recent additions from eBay and my personal collection. You'll find more recent pricing and some additional models that I had no clue existed. I've recently picked up a few Defenders on eBay that I'll be posting about soon. One of the Defenders DF-2001 has all the paperwork, manual, felt box and a nice little pillow. I've been after this one for years!

The forum. The discussion forum doesn't get a whole lot of traffic and I am going to start posting and encouraging more conversations there. A long time collector emailed me some pics of his massive collection that is for sale and I'm in process now of gathering up the images and listing out the pricing. I encourage you to do the same. As much as I love eBay, I hate the fee structure and dealing with 0 feedback bidders, so if we could buy/sell/trade watches in the forum it's a great example of a community and it's free. Go for it! Also a great place for general conversations especially if you don't use Facebook.

Limited Edition Checklist. An ex-Fossil employee met up with us on Facebook and one of his first orders of business was to update the checklist. I admit the original one I had on there was just a copy of a checklist I found in some old Fossil literature. It could be a full-time job to update this checklist because of the massive amount of Limited Editions out there! Our new friend has done the hard work and here's your new updated checklist!

New Fossil Limited Edition Check List

Finally just a reminder that there is a Facebook group out there for Fossil Collectors. There is a bit more activity on there and more day to day type of posts. I've gotten a few emails from people saying they aren't on Facebook and not to focus on it, I get that, but if you are on Facebook please consider joining our group and adding to the discussions.

Happy Collecting!

Happy 1 Year Anniversary

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This week (February 10th to be exact) is the one year anniversary of www.undergroundfossilcollectors.club and I'd like to take an opportunity to post my thoughts and lessons learned over the past 12 months of running this site and ask for your feedback and suggestions.

Our little Underground Fossil Collectors Club started out as an experiment to do something I do every day at work (web site project management) and do it on a personal level. Like most projects you and I start out with high hopes and crazy aspirations, I can remember writing up a list of potential posts that I would create for the site. I had a list of 30 posts and thought that list would get me through March of 2010. My goal then was to post 5-7 items a week. Year to date I've had 39 posts, not quite 1 per week.

Once summer 2010 hit the posting numbers were not that great and I began to realize this site wasn’t a news site, so I could never compete with a Jalopnik or Kotaku, where they post everyday on new items or what’s happing in the industry. The majority of my interest in Fossil and probably yours too is Fossil items in the 1990’s. That’s when the advertising and watches reflected that 40’s and 50’s charm that I love so much. In my mind the purpose of the site changed from regular updates to creating posts that were timeless......okay so maybe timeless is a strong word, but I wanted to create a post that wouldn’t be outdated or lost in a few days. Blog posts tend to get buried in paginations and RSS feeds.

This line of thinking is leading me towards restructuring the site in the future so that it is no longer in blog format, but more of a total site with articles and information. This site does get good traffic on the older articles, but I need to get them front and center for good points of reference. I guess more on this as the year progresses.

I mentioned earlier this site does get a good deal of traffic -- considering everything that is out there and the fact that the site is one year old, I'm pretty happy with the results. Underground Fossil Collectors Club has seen 7969 Total Pageviews, 1494 unique visitors and the average visitor spends 3 minutes on the site and checks out 4 pages per visit. The most searched for item on the site is the Defender Series and airplane watches. Top referring site is Google of course. Oddly enough not one visit came from Yahoo.

Top countries that visit in order of number of visits:

  1. United States

  2. Germany

  3. United Kingdom

  4. Italy

  5. Canada

  6. Netherlands

  7. Serbia

  8. Romania

  9. Philippines

  10. Australia

When I started the site I had one goal in mind – to create an online community for fellow Fossil collectors. Fossil watches and their advertising memorabilia has always been a passion of mine and to be honest the online presence for this hobby was never really that great and I found myself doing exhaustive Google searches to find out anything I could on Limited Edition watches and random memorabilia I had. My hope that the Underground Fossil Collectors Club has helped you out in some way.

Lastly I'd like to hear from you. What do you think of the site? Would a revamped site be better than the current format? I'm also open to any suggestions for articles. If desired I can even grant access to create postings if someone would be interested in writing content for the site.

Drop me a line (my email is on the About section) or leave a comment here and tell me your thoughts on the site. Thank you!

Dr. Pepper Limited Edition

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Did anyone else see the recent auction for #1 out of a 3000 item run for the Dr. Pepper Limited Edition watch and kit? Amazing auction and it finally ended at $305. Totally shocked at the price, but I am thinking it's due to #1 number and not so much because it's Dr. Pepper. I've seen these on eBay before, but never with the cool kit and the sweater & towel. Very cool auction.

Winning bidder want to give us more details?

What’s the rarest Fossil collectable?

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I can never figure out the rarest Fossil collectable that was available to the public. Obviously it has to be one of the limited releases, something available in the mid-late 90’s maybe. The lowest production numbers I’ve seen on eBay are the 1000 item runs, there’s a Minnie Mouse and a Stars Wars that I’ve seen as 1 of 1000. I’m also excluding the sports watches given out to college football teams. Any experts out there who would know or does anyone know of a chart or guide available? 

The beginning

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I bought my first Fossil watch in 1996 and starting collecting Fossil watches and Fossil memorabilia around 2000. I’ve noticed quite a bit of Fossil collection chatter out there on the Web and lately I seem to keep running into the same people on eBay bidding on the same items I am.

From what I can see no real site exists where Fossil collectors can socialize online. I hope www.undergroundfossilcollectors.club becomes the Fossil collection hub with lots of input from various collectors.