Fossil Winter Catalog 95-96
Please enjoy. I find this catalog very useful in research and overall nostalgia. The images are rather large in the slideshow below and I know this -- I did it to showcase the model numbers and prices that are in Deutsche Marks. I've also posted the gallery along with a few others in the main navigation of the site under Catalog Scans.
Surprise ornament from Fossil
More often than I like to tell my wife, I order things from the current Fossil catalog and with the free overnight shipping earlier this month I couldn't resist. I needed a new belt, nothing exciting and to my surprise I had a nice little vintage surprise thrown into the package.
Came with a little card that says "We created this vintage-inspired tin decoration just for you. It's just a little something to spread holiday cheer..." It also came with a to and from tag, but there is no way I'm giving this to anyone. Merry Christmas to me!
I have to say there are some items in the current Fossil catalog that is being inspired by the good old days of their advertising. There are some wallets with 50's cars on them and even a tablet leather case with robots on it. Really great stuff, but too pricey for this father of 2.
Fossil - Universal Monster Series
Here's a nice timely post about 2 weeks past Halloween. I've always liked these watches, but have never purchased any of them. Mainly because they are typically expensive and sold as collectibles online. A few of them had a very limited release and were released under license from Universal Studios. There are other versions of several of these watches, but I don't think they belong in the original Universal Monster Series because they are newer than the ones listed below.
The Universal Monster series was released in 1995 and each watch included a pewter figurine of the "monster". None of the "newer" ones included such a figurine.
- Dracula-The Vampire Thriller: LI-1350
- 1000 of these produced.
- Frankenstein: LI-1285
- 15,000 of these produced.
- Features Boris Karloff's version of Frankenstein.
- Godzilla: LI-1297
- 1000 of these produced.
- King Kong: LI-1277
- 10,000 of these produced.
Official replacement band idea
I get a lot of emails (and spam) around replacement bands for Fossil watches. We've gotten some great suggestions and comments, but my new trend is now buying old broken Fossil watches and using the bands. I don't have a lot of money and I love eBay/garage sales and plus let's face it -- Fossil made some hideous watches in the 90's and they use the same bands as the good ones.
Recently I purchased a broken Starmaster watch on eBay. I verified with the seller that the band was official and $11 later I have a new band (and a broken Starmaster). The band nicely replaced a broken band on my favorite Defender watch DE-1500.
The timing is nice because I am now going to sport this watch for the next 2 weeks on my trip to London.
Fossil DE-1500 and an official leather band!
Updated Facebook Group for Fossil Collector's Club
Yes the posts have been relaxed lately, but the action doesn't have to stop here because I'm lazy and enjoying summer. The Facebook group has been updated to the new version of their groups tool. It looks great and people can finally be added again. Currently I'm organizing pictures on there to be in albums. Please feel free to keep the conversations going and post pictures in there as well. I'd love to see what everyone has! This Facebook group is for all of us to enjoy.
I'm working on a few posts for the site here on my new Dick Tracy Watch, 2 new Defenders I picked up and some random advertising pieces I've gotten a hold of this summer. Looking forward to more posts in the fall when the days are shorter and it's too cold for me to enjoy the great outdoors!
Facebook Group - Fossil Watch Collectors Club
More Fossil Defender updates and a small rant
The Fossil Defender Series Guide has been updated with 3 new images. Thanks to a new reader Adam we now have a better image of the DE-1507 and new DE-1505 and DE-1520 pictures, which I didn't have before. Adam also sent some pictures of the original box for his DE-1507. For those of you who don't know much about Defenders they came in special cases, not the tins we're used to seeing. Defender was one of the 8 genres of watches Fossil offered in the 90's and they were a bit more premium than the normal releases.
Planet Fossil: Fifth and final Around the World Series watches
Finally back in action and I wanted to highlight the remaining watches in the Around the World Series. I've already discussed 2 of the 5 watches so far. Here's the breakdown of watches
Streamliner
Aero-Pilot
Planet Fossil
The Planet Fossil was released in December 1994 and came with a lapel pin and packaged in a globe theme collectors tin. In my opinion of the 5 watches this is the least attractive to me -- maybe it's because mine doesn't look like the ones in the brochures or maybe because it's been worn and needs a good cleaning. Either way this watch was the last in the Around the World Series and was limited to only 20,000 made.
As with the Captain Fossil watch I am really in love with the tin for this watch. The lid is a piece of art with a young couple staring off into the world. They did a nice job incorporating the "around the world" tagline -- be nice if this tin could be made into a poster. All around the sides of the tin are random pictures of people doing different actions with a globe.
This was the hardest watch for me to find. I don't know what that means as far as collectibility, but it's definitely the oddball in the family.
Watch details:
Planet Fossil Limited Edition Collector's Watch.
Watch #5 in a 5 item set of Around the World Series.
Original cost $70 USD
This watch is #7034 of 20000 made
Model #LE-9452
Fossil Defender Updates and 1995 Catalog pics
I have some updates for you and 2 really cool scans on the Fossil Defender series.
On the top of the site you'll see a permanently housed link called Fossil Defender Series. This link contains a basic guide of Fossil Defender watches that I come across. Some have been emailed by you, some are from catalogs, some are from my personal collection and most are from eBay auctions. I don't post prices there because of 2 reasons.
eBay prices are sporadic, seen the same watch range from $10-$90 for no reason
I don't want to dictate the market and give sellers a guide on what they should list for.
The other update I wanted to share is 2 scans from the Fossil 1995-96 winter catalog. I found 2 catalogs on eBay and I will be using these a lot in the coming weeks/months/years to showcase some of the cool items Fossil did in the mid-nineties. I've already learned a lot and I can't wait to share it with you and hopefully get some great feedback. Today I have scanned the only 2 pages of Fossil Defender watches.
Happy 1 Year Anniversary
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:
United States
Germany
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Netherlands
Serbia
Romania
Philippines
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!
Fossil.com via Archive.org
Ever go to www.archive.org? It’s a great site where you can travel back in time and see what various websites looked like in the past. I’ve used archive.org frequently to research Fossil watches and limited edition releases that were listed online. Most of what I know about Fossil Defender series watches I’ve pulled from this site. Too bad I couldn’t order one online.
For fans of the old Fossil advertising campaigns, archive.org is your place to go to see some of the artwork in action on the web. Below is a sample of some of the artwork I have pulled from the site. Sad thing is I can remember some of these pages when they were live back in 1996 and now they are archived for historical purposes.
Anyone out there know if I could use some of these pictures on this site? I’ve been tempted to use some of these images from time to time on a few pages, but I’ve always refrained. This post is simply showing the images that you can find on some of the old Fossil sites on www.archive.org
One of the most intriguing pictures I’ve seen is the picture of the Fossil bus. Don’t know the story on it, but it looks cool and it definitely had to be a show-stopper.
