Timex

Founded in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company, Timex is one of the oldest watchmakers still operating today, and by far the most mass-market: its watches sell in department stores and pharmacies as often as jewelry shops. Best known for its 1950s ‘Takes a licking and keeps on ticking’ advertising and for popularizing the Indiglo backlight in 1992, Timex builds mostly quartz and sourced-automatic watches spanning about $40 to $400 — plus a small Swiss-made automatic line, the Giorgio Galli S2, that pushes past $1,000.

Timex's core identity is volume and value rather than in-house engineering: unlike Seiko or Orient, it doesn't manufacture its own movements, instead using quartz modules and outsourced automatic calibers across nearly its entire catalog. What it does instead is design — the Marlin line revives Timex's own 1960s dive-chronograph shapes with a modern automatic movement, and Q Timex reissues a 1970s quartz design that became a surprise hit with younger collectors after its 2019 relaunch. Timex leans hard into pop-culture collaborations (Peanuts, Pan Am, Todd Snyder) and outdoor-utility lines (Expedition, Ironman) rather than complications or heritage prestige, positioning it below Seiko and Citizen on most collectors' value ladders but well ahead of them on price and availability.