The Business of Watches [015] Marathon Watches CEO Mitchell Wein Says He Has To Be Ready For War

35:02We have special stopwatches for production, that's, you know, very important. And eventually I found spare parts, we made a thousand extra cases. I found a thousand extra cases in the attic in our old building. And I said to my dad, we have got to do something with it. And I had someone who was interested in buying them and reselling them, and he was reselling them on the internet. And we weren't making any money. You weren't making money from that, no. I wasn't making any money because I was being drilled down in price, and I just wanted to use up these new old stock cases and didn't think about building the brand, but I realized that, wow, this is really building the brand.

35:47And I think we should take control of this ourselves. We had a website, which we did not sell on, but it was a reference website. And we started selling on the web, and people found out about us on the web. and we started getting, just recently, getting a group of distributors throughout the world that would be able to handle and sell our watches. So we have many companies that buy our watches that we trust. Customers are as important as suppliers. Suppliers have to be number one and so do customers and we do have that in the United States and Canada. So just so I understand, though, I mean, what does your business look like in terms of percentages now?

36:38Clocks, I would say 80 % of our clock sales are consumer. We now sell them on Amazon and we have very good clock systems. We do our engineering in Canada and you're going to see something brand new that we're going to be manufacturing a big wall clock in Canada for industries such as we used to many years ago. So stopwatches, almost 95 % is government. Stopwatches is 95 %? Mechanical. Mechanical stopwatches, 95 % government. What does the various governments, why do they need mechanical stopwatches now, still? Training. Estimation of speed of torpedoes. Estimating impacts. Pings. Training for sports.

37:29training for what's very important is when you're using a centrifuge and you're separating white blood cells from red blood cells, you have to know if you don't have a machine that has an actual timer on a new modern machine, you do need that stopwatch. And the thing that there's a difference between mechanical stopwatches and digital stopwatches, and I don't think people think about it, but with a mechanical stopwatch, just like an analog wristwatch, you could tell the time just by glancing at it. It takes longer for your brain to function and record the time when to the digital wristwatch or digital stopwatch.

38:10You actually have to see, oh, it's 35 minutes and 24 seconds and five one hundredth of a second when you stop the stopwatch. But really, you don't need that accuracy, but it's a cheap way of giving a stopwatch. The true stopwatch is a mechanical stopwatch because when you're doing an operation, you have to glance it out of your eyes and you have to be able to return that point to zero and start timing another function. When you see commanders training their troops, they're timing them with a marathon stopwatch. when President Bush was the president of the United States, I knew for a fact that he had two marathon stopwatches because he used to time his speeches.

38:59See, there's all different things you could use mechanical stopwatches for. Another good thing about mechanical stopwatches is that you could train people how to not stutter. So in big stuttering projects, speech therapists use mechanical stopwatches, and you could do that on your own. See how long you're stuttering for. You could do your homework yourself by having a stopwatch yourself. Wristwatches. 80 % of our wristwatches are still to government issue. Our field watches basically are used on soldiers' wrists. The wristwatches that are most popular for military are mechanical wristwatches. Why?

39:45Because of the EMP. What do we do with our wristwatches? Sorry, what's the EMP? Oh, electromagnetic pulse. When there's a nuclear bomb that goes off, there's a huge EMP that will stop. There's a magnetic pulse that will stop such things as transistor radios or the computer or the recording machine I see in front of me, but a mechanical movement won't be affected by it, especially if it's antimagnetic. But it isn't just in a nuclear blast that'll cause an EMP. EMP could be caused by any type of explosion with any type of material. It could be caused by a big TNT blast. Okay. And so being able to withstand an EMP with a mechanical watch is part of the function.

40:36The soldier will survive a blast. A soldier will survive because he has the best equipment afforded to him, at least in the governments we supply. And a lot of our wristwatches are worn not on the wrist. In combat, they're worn outside the wrist so the soldiers can synchronize an attack or have their battalion all on the exact same time. They synchronize the watch. They hack the watch. So hacking a watch means when you pull out the stem, you stop the movement, you synchronize the second hand to 12 to zero, and then you move the time correctly, and you push in the crown, and then you're all synced.

41:22So you're exactly on the same seconds. The other watch style that we do is the navigation watch. Navigation watch was purposely built for flight officers. it's used in many other realms of battle but also really there are navigation watches are very good alternate for a gmt movement watch it will allow the user to cut his costing on buying a watch having the quality of a marathon watch of a navigation watch and another good thing about it is you could use it as a timing bezel. The timing bezel is great because if you're in an old aircraft that has its fuel tanks in the wings, and you see, you can't always count on computers to tell you which tank of fuel to use.

42:21And, you know, the navigator and the users of the watch have to know that every hour you have to switch the tank or else you won't have a balanced aircraft. Just so people understand then, And so your navigation watch, it has a bezel on it, and it's basically a numbered timing bezel, right? A timing ring. And so, indeed, that can be used to time various— As a GMT. Like a GMT, or you can use it—indeed, you can use the bezel to tell a different time zone. Tell the story. So when you start your aircraft, what you do is you move the triangle, which is the zero position, to the minute. So right now it's 143.

43:07So I would move my turning bezel to the 43 marker. And I know that when it hits one hour here at the one, I'll go water the plants every hour, if you know what I mean. But the other thing is coming from Canada to Switzerland, it's a six-hour time difference. So what I'll do is move my turning bezel so that the six-hour position is at the 12, and I never have to change the time on my watch. All I know is when I want to look at Swiss time, I look at it as being six hours ahead, and the outer bezel is what I use for my hours. Exactly. The dial is for Canada. The bezel is for Switzerland. And so there is, so obviously what you're saying is whether it be a navigation style watch or a search and rescue, a dive watch style, such as the watch you have in your hand there, there's still demand from governments, whether it be in government departments like agriculture or in obviously military use today.

44:13and that's still a big part of your business. But people have learned that what the military uses is a very good idea. And many people buy, I'd say around 40 % now of our navigation watch orders come from the public because they know they could depend on a marathon. And also it's, you know what? We don't have bells and whistles. We don't have messy dials. We just want to be able to tell the time. As a matter of fact, our navigator, without date is by far a bestseller. Why? We don't even put our name on the dial to distract people. We have no date. And the wonderful thing about having a watch with no date, which I like because I have a lot of watches, as you know, I don't have to pick up the watch and change the date.

45:00It's ready to go. Can I just ask you, with the Navigator, you sell that both in Quartz and an automatic as well. What's more popular? What do governments and pilots order more? Yeah, how does that look? Well, for the departments we supply with the government, price is a very important thing. During the Persian Gulf War, we're making a lot of watches for the navigation watches in steel. My father is having the cases made here, as well as in France, for our production here. That's because the order was so big. You said, I think, 30 ,000, 60 ,000 watches. Well, it wasn't just so big. We were very close to our French watchmaking partners in Besançon and Fleurier.

45:44Remember, we're in the watchmaking region, and in those days, there wasn't so much of a border. There was watch parts traveling between Switzerland and France all the time, and we had a very good case manufacturer in France. But we were able to develop a fiberglass, a light-weighted case, and save the taxpayers about 15 francs,$15, a watch. Imagine 10 ,000 watches,$150 ,000. That pays for a lot of other equipment that the government needs. Or they could pay down the debt, they could do whatever they want for the money. But we have to be respectful that when we produce a product, it's taxpayers' money involved.

46:26It's not our money. It is the government's money, but it's taxpayers' money, and I'm a taxpayer. And so do you take different margin? Do you expect different margin? Our margins for government are the lowest. What does that mean, the lowest? By law and by morality, we make less margin selling to government than any other customer in the world. We did all this research to make a good watch, and the retail customer does pay more than the government, but therefore they should, and a lot of the profits from that subsidize government purchasing. Right. And can you talk about specifically, I mean, we know that you supply the U.S.

47:06government, the Canadian government, the Israeli military. Can you talk about, you know, in general terms, who your customers are on the government side? No, I can't. But we see your watch. Yeah, I know people know, and people see them on different forces throughout Europe. You know, we have a system where allied forces are able to purchase through us through a certain program. United Nations has certain programs. The U.S. government has the GSA where small militaries or militaries that are part of NATO could buy from on special fixed pricing. NATO, which is in Luxembourg, does catalog all our NSNs.

47:52We have special government part numbers, which are called NATO stock numbers. Some countries call them national stock numbers, but that's the coding to identify what that watch is. When you see a watch or any part, it fits that spec and is assigned an NSN. With the search and rescue watches, those were developed by us for the Canadian government. and that's a big story on its own. This was a watch that you developed and a watch style that you developed when and why and where does it stand now in your collection? So why don't I bring you forward right now? So that watch style was developed for search and rescue workers who worked off the east and west coasts of Canada.

48:45As you know, Canada is the second largest country in the world and we are from ocean to ocean Atlantic to Pacific and we have two major bases which hold our submarines and battleships what happened was we were making dive watches for the Canadian government. The Canadian government was spending in those days I would say in 1980s a few thousand dollars, two thousand dollars a watch for Rolex dive watches and that was a big amount of money, and I thought it was a big amount of money as me, the taxpayer of Canada, to pay for one watch where more soldiers could have watches or the Canadian government can save some money.

49:30In those days, the requirement was 200 meters in depth. I used a case that was made in France. We used, in those days, the 2824 movements. And the case manufacturer one day called me and said, well, you only have 100 more cases and that's all we could do. You have to give me money for tooling so we could make that case again because our tooling broke. And I thought to myself, I'm not going to give you money to make tooling for a case that perhaps is not the best for us. And I certainly am not going to do engineering and make cases with you and you're going to share it with my competition. That's not fair.

50:22So I spoke to my dad and I told him we have to make another case. I was speaking with Fabrication here in Switzerland to make these cases. And I thought that I might as well find out what's good about our watch and what's bad about our watch because I think we could sell a lot more watches to the government if we did a better job at it. So I went outside the box. I went to visit my friend Andrew who was actually you know people my age went to Yugoslavia to that war and he just was there and I asked him what he thought and there's a bunch of people who were his friends and they all said to me right away they said well the problem with your watch is when you turn the bezel it's impossible to really turn the bezel because it was so flat.

51:27It was so flat against the case. So when you have gloves and you're in cold water, it made it even more difficult. They said, why don't you make a bigger bezel? And I thought, well, they're using those gloves. So I'd make the bezel high, but with notches. And those mesh gloves could lock in. There were other things. And I remember they said, well, why don't you make it 300 meters? Make it 300 meters. I was trying to make things better than what was out in the market. I wanted to achieve the best dive watch in the world to be a Canadian invention. I believe that it was. We only supplied the Canadian government those days.

52:11And one day I got a call from someone very important in the U.S. government. I actually was going to hang up. I thought it was a crank phone call because he's not really calling me. I mean, who am I? I work for a watch company in Canada. He said, why do we not have those here in our military? Why do we not supply these watches to our soldiers? And it's like, I'm thinking to myself, it's like, well, it's not my fault. Anyways, before you know it, they took watches into the engineering department and tested them and examined them and decided that they're going to write up an item product description.

52:54and assign an NSN. But we already had a NATO stock number assigned to us through NATO as a Canadian NATO stock number, and they couldn't change it. They had to buy, so the U.S. government actually still today buys our automatic 41-millimeter GSAR with the original NATO stock number assigned to us in Luxembourg by NATO as a Canadian NATO number. But then they're very wise people in engineering, And they said, well, listen, you're using tritium paint on the dials. We would like you to use tritium tubes on the dials just like you do. Who suggested the tube? The U.S. government. And could you also make it out of quartz?

53:38Would you be able to save us money? And so we made a quartz version with tritium tubes. And that was the first star watch made with the tritium tubes. It was a quartz watch. And then advancements were made and we did do it. with tubes for the automatic watch. To sum up then that story, so the SAR, the search and rescue, it remains a core part of your offering and your lineup. Am I right to think then you're telling me that basically, because I think the Canadian, I'm not sure what part of the armed forces it was, but there are, we see, you know, some old Tudor watches. It was Department of Defense.

54:19Department of Defense. D-E-F-E-N-C-E, which is spelt that way in Canada. In the United States, it's Department of Defense spelt with an S. With an S, indeed. And so am I right to think, though, that basically the SAR, the Search and Rescue, then sort of replaced the Tudor watch as what was the supply for those in the military then? Is that right? For the Canadian military, yes. The Canadian military has gone through a lot of changes, and I think that they've also gone through a lot of growth that was needed. But the Canadian government sometimes has experimented by buying cheaper watches to save money, and the quality of those watches were not from us, and I know they were not good.

55:15Okay. And now I know they weren't good because they called us up one year and said, we have all these watches of yours and they don't work. We don't know what to do with them. We need parts to fix them and everything. I said, you know, forget that. We sold you the watches. You're the government. Send it back to us. And of course, I want to, you know, when something bad happens, you want to find out maybe there's a defect or whatever. What happens is they all came back, but they weren't our brand. Right. The Canadian government decided to cheap out. And they bought from a competitor. They bought from another manufacturer, which wasn't pre-qualified.

55:55They should have tested the items. That was many years ago. So that was around 15, 20 years ago. So I don't want to get anybody angry that that happened. It's ancient history, water under the bridge. You mentioned earlier, though, that obviously you make clocks as well. and various timing devices. And you said you're going to now start assembling and building clocks in Canada. Again, talk about that initiative and why you're doing that and what that product is going to be and who it's going to be for. So as government contractors, we always built clocks, but not too many. So with the U.S. government, we built two different ships' clocks, one with a 24-hour dial and one with a 12-hour dial, which is the normal AM, PM, 12-hour revolution.

56:45Submarines always took the 24 hours so you would know whether it's a.m. or p.m. inside the submarine. Those were very difficult to make. As a matter of fact, I was very young when we were making them, and I was responsible in the assembly line to make sure that everything worked and each different clock had to be hand-adjusted with hands. In Canada, we're government contractors, and government contractors mean we don't just supply wristwatches for the government. It's all other timing devices. The category is FSC Class 6645, and we have supplied clocks as office equipment. If you go to Plaster Portage in Ottawa, many, many buildings in Ottawa still have our clocks that we supplied them maybe 20, 30 years ago.

57:37So in the Diefenbunker, which is outside of Ottawa, those clocks are 50 years old and still working. And I was amazed to see that. But talk about how the manufacturing of those clocks has changed in what you're doing now. So those clocks were always made either here in Switzerland or a final assembly in Canada or in the United States, in Buffalo. In Buffalo, we have a facility which we do major distribution for, but also we're starting to do some final assembly to make sure that the people we sell to also are employed by us, give them employment. With Canada, my home country, we developed an atomic clock many years ago that was synchronized to the radio signal of the atomic clock in Colorado.

58:34As we became a worldwide corporation, we wanted to do this for Europe. And what we developed was the same clock, but with a different radio frequency to pick up from the Frankfurt Tower. There are some things when you develop a product that if you teach different people, suppliers, how to manufacture it, or the engineering or secrets of how you make a product, they will copy you and maybe sell it to your competition or sell it to unfavorable players in the market. and we decided with our latest invention, our new atomic clock that has one antenna with two different frequencies that could capture both the Frankfurt Tower as well as the Colorado Tower, but also it's very simple to set up.

59:31I developed a switch system that is very easy to, at the back of the clock, instead of pushing buttons in sequence and holding two buttons together. We just manufactured this clock with many switches. The reason why we're assembling this clock in Canada and making parts in Canada and making it Canadian is because we do it the best. I don't know any other company in any other country that could make a clock as good as ours. But it costs more. It costs more to do. You know what? Our watches cost a lot more to make in Switzerland. The cost of labor, the cost of quality control, the cost of rent, the cost of being a citizen, the cost of being not union run.

1:00:24We belong to the Federation or Lingerie, but treating people as if they were family and everybody should make a decent living costs a lot of money. We're not going to use a country to assemble our clocks that doesn't respect labor codes. And I believe that's very important. The morality is more important than anything else. So basically, though, what you're saying is I think you were manufacturing the clocks elsewhere, perhaps in Asia. We had our lesson. We were making clocks in Asia. We developed many different style clocks and atomic systems. And we came up with new engineering. or having them made in Asia for us.

1:01:06And what do you know, our competition suddenly had the same clock as us or they had the same technology as us. And I thought to myself, what am I doing here? Some countries just do not respect intellectual property and trademarks and copyrights. And I really don't want to deal with those countries. If you have someone that comes in your house and steals from you, You're not going to bite them again. Probably not. Probably not. So that's why we're developing the business in Canada to manufacture the clocks. Another thing going on in Canada is we have a great plastics industry. We have great industry.

1:01:49And the car industry is a very integral part of the Canadian economy. But just because you inject plastic car parts doesn't mean you can't do other things. So we have to diversify. And so do our car manufacturers and car part manufacturers. And we're looking at, we're working with manufacturing plants that make plastic parts for a car to make the cases for us. The switch systems, even the screws. The screws, Robertson screws are a Canadian screw and they're very hard to use, but very good for us. and there are companies that make our Canadian screws. And you know what? When you use a screw from Marathon, you're going to be ensured that the hardness of the screw is there and you're not going to...

1:02:45You know how you have a lousy screw and you use your screwdriver and it misthreads it? Well, not good. So if I understand correctly, though, I mean, obviously the world, you know, geopolitics have changed immensely in the past little while. And, you know, countries have, you know, led by political changes in the United States. Countries have begun looking inward more and looking to be doing more manufacturing themselves. It is less of a international world trade atmosphere all of a sudden. So am I right to think then, are you doing more assembly in more operations in the United States? Are you trying to do things in each of the countries that you supply?

1:03:32And how do you manage that situation right now when the country of origin of products has become so important all of a sudden to those government buyers? To the duty tax rate, correct. Well, there are certain things that happen with the... Well, with Canada, there's 0 % duty on Swiss-made products. We have a free trade agreement with Switzerland, just as we used to have with the United States. Now the United States has added a 39 % duty, and I'm not going to say whether that's right or wrong. I think that has to be negotiated on a government level. How Marathon handled the cost, our costs have increased dramatically, and we're hoping that things will turn more favorable.

1:04:20So we were not going to jump on the gun and just raise our prices. We've had difficulties with the foreign currency. Last year, the Swiss franc was 1.1, meaning you could buy one franc for$1.10 US. Now it's 1.26, I think, today. That's 15%. It's a very strong haven, such as gold is. We've had our cost increases. But we as a company have tightened our belts, lowered our expenses. We've turned down the thermostat, but could still do the same work. Wear sweaters at work. No, it's not that bad. But we've absorbed a good part of that tax. And I am very hopeful that soon that the Swiss government and the U.S.

1:05:14government will come to an agreement. Can I ask you then, how has that change in administration and obviously that change in sort of political attitudes, has it had an impact at all yet on your role as a supplier to the U.S. government or to other governments around the world? The raise in the Swiss franc, 15 % approximately, has hurt us. As far as the duties for Department of Defense in the U.S., the government doesn't pay taxes on itself. And when we ship the watches to the packing house or we ship to the Department of Defense directly from our factory. They're not impacted by the terms. There's special clauses and contracts, and the American Customs knows not to charge duty because you're charging duty on the government itself.

1:06:09I see. Yeah, I didn't realize that. And if they didn't do that, we would have to charge more because our margins are so low as it is, we would be losing money with every single watch we make. Right. And so in this greater context, then, what should we expect to see next for Marathon? What are the kind of future projects you're working on and how might we see, you know, the company and the product evolve going forward? Well, as usual, we're always looking at new materials and new construction, new engineering. That search and rescue watch, which is 41 millimeters, we have, you know, they're human beings made in different sizes.

1:06:51So we've made it in the 46 millimeter and a 36 millimeter. We're one of the first companies to make such a small watch, as you know, because not everybody's wrist is made the same. Indeed, the 36 millimeter fits my wrist the best. Yeah, mine too. and what we're looking forward to in the new year is allowing for different uses of our watches such as by putting in the white dials the people that work in bright lights can see the time better but also what we are working on is to lower the weights of our watches and increase the impact resistance of our watches. You're going to see something in around January that we have a new chemical that will change the way our composite watches are made.

1:07:49Ah, interesting. And they'll be stronger and even better and have higher visibility. From using less materials for cases, we could allow for a bigger viewing space for the dial, which makes it easier for the user or warfighter to see the time, which is what the watch is really made for, just to see the time. Indeed. And when I think about your business, I'm still, I think, trying to understand it. Wristwatches, clocks, timing devices like stopwatches, how, just from my understanding. Don't forget about the timers. And the timers as well. Yeah, which timers, which I think of like, which would include stopwatches.

1:08:35So remind me how big each percentage-wise in terms of your total business, how big each is and how much is government and how much is consumer. These are the things I'm trying to figure out about your business. So, Andy, are you talking about dollars or volume? We can, percentage-wise, whatever you have more at hand is easier for me to understand. Okay. Volume-wise, around 80 % of our watches go to government end users. Government-associated end users, which means it could be the Department of Immigration. Not necessarily just military. Not just military. So wristwatches, 80 % the government is the buyer and 20 % is consumer.

1:09:23And then on clocks and... I would say 80 % consumer, 20 % government. That's interesting. Okay, so that's really changed a lot, I presume. It's changed. It didn't change from any other reason than what the consumer wanted. And it just so happens we have a lot of five-star ratings that are repeated thousands of times on Amazon on our clocks. And people, once they buy a marathon clock, they usually stick with the brand. And it's a dependable clock brand. And it's important, obviously, and Amazon is probably the place where the majority of your clocks are sold now. I think so. Our clocks are also sold at Staples in North America online, and Staples has a government entity.

1:10:13Whereas, so let's say, let's say, Staples has a special government division. Okay, interesting. And then for stopwatches and timing devices, is that back to the 80s? Stopwatches as well as mechanical stopwatches are supplied to the U.S. and Canadian governments. The digital stopwatches that we do supply the U.S. government are not Asian made. They used to be. They used to be made in Hong Kong and we are using Canadian materials and assembling them now in Canada. When did you change that? We changed around two years ago. That's interesting. It was a silent change. It's only the black stopwatch that we do like that.

1:10:57Because if we had to sell those stopwatches on Amazon, it costs more to make. I mean, imagine just the lanyard alone. We get them from, I think, a company in Winnipeg, the lanyards, it's a shoelace company. It costs 10 times as much as buying something from Asia. But you know what? I just gave a whole bunch of Canadians jobs. So I'm very happy about that. Interesting. And so that business, that timing device and stopwatch side of the business, how much is government and how much is consumer now? I'd say 50-50 on the digital. 50-50 on digital. 95 % on the mechanical go to government. 95 % go to government.

1:11:38This is interesting. Because they're very expensive. Yeah, they're not cheap. And they take a long time to make. The parts are expensive. When I have to buy parts here in Switzerland, so just the hearts alone and the stems, you have to buy at least 5 ,000 at a time. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a big ask. You know, just by buying the hearts in Switzerland, the center axe, I buy the springs from a spring company, you know, here in Switzerland. It costs me more for those parts than to buy a whole stopwatch from China. but the stopwatch from China is of course a copy of a Swiss made stopwatch but they don't even keep the time they clunk out and you know not to say that all Chinese stopwatches are but the Chinese watches I've tested haven't haven't stood up haven't performed as well you mentioned the last thing just so I understand what kind of volumes you do I think you do more than 20 ,000 watches a year.

1:12:42Would that be right to think? It is. How much more? When I think of like... Quite a bit more. Quite a bit more. If you're talking about just wristwatches, I'd say I can't give you the quantities because that would be unfair. I was told don't say anything about quantities because I'm not allowed to, especially since it would reveal what government buys and what they're preparing for. Right. Okay, but our volume isn't what it was in the 1990s because Garmin Systems happens to be a good company and those systems are also used with the U.S. government. And the government has to do and use what is best for the warfighter.

1:13:27Sure, absolutely. But we are right to think, though, that the U.S. government is still your, the various entities of the U.S. government are still your biggest customer. Yes, but we are selling many watches to other countries such as Singapore, Germany, France, Italy, England. You know, we are selling to a lot of different countries now. And we're expanding, we're getting requests from different militaries, allied forces. Right. If that remains, you know, the biggest part of your business is supplying government. How do you stay ahead? How do you remain competitive? There's lots of watch companies in the world and lots of them have supplied government in the past and some do it more and more.

1:14:16And obviously we see lots of soldiers wearing G-Shocks and garments. True, but it's a whole department on its own. There has to be constant correspondence studying with engineering departments within a government. And you have to be willing to be fully audited by the government. I mean, you have to. You're an open book. We never know when an inspector is going to come by. And they have to come in and see that what you're making is qualified. I think that because we are very serious on quality, it's not about making the money. I mean, we do make money, but we're not the richest watch company around, that's for sure.

1:15:04But I think that our morality, which I grew up with, is brought forward to all our employees. I believe very heavily that to do the right thing. Sure. We have compensated for a lot of lower government sales over the years, even though sometimes it spikes, sometimes it doesn't. You'll know from an incident that happens. Our partnerships, we've had partnerships with J.Crew, as you know. Oh, right. Yes, yeah, that's right. And now we have a big partnership with the Jeep Motor Car Corporation. That's right. So let's talk about that in the, yeah, I mean, how, you know, government contracts fluctuate and how you've partnered more with private entities and well-known brands to boost the business.

1:15:56Yeah. Well, I think they appreciate the quality. And I appreciate the capability of being able to get out of just that tunnel of just military. For instance, we developed the Navigator. My father developed the Steel Navigator and then we switched it to a composite material to save the government money. but there's always been a big drive and a big want from Marathon to come back with the steel case, and we did. And that's an option for government to buy, but they usually buy the fiberglass ones because they could save money. Well, this year, I decided that we always do a special maple leaf edition for our watches, but this year we decided to do a limited edition of a special watch.

1:16:51why? The reason is because this is the year of our 60th anniversary of the flag, of the Canadian flag. It used to be under the British standard up to 1965. And it was a big part of Canadian history to fight for the new design of the new Canadian flag. And I think it was the senator's daughter, sort of like a Betsy Ross story, that came up with our new Canadian flag design, which is just a maple leaf with two red banners on each side, placed on a foreground of white. And I thought it would be great with our Arctic navigator. And we were able to experiment with colorization of our turning bezel.

1:17:36Our turning bezels, the inserts are made of aluminum. and what we were able to do was anodize it that the red would match the exact red of the Canadian flag. We used the specification, of course, of the Canadian flag from the Canadian government to make sure that maple looks exactly as it should and that we would use the red that's assigned by the Canadian government for the red turning bezel. But you didn't realize that that was a difficult... It was a very difficult thing, a lot of experimentation. To change the bezel like that. I think the case manufacturer, which is in Le Chaudufon, at one point probably wanted to kill me.

1:18:21We kept on rejecting it. But being Canadian, I don't want to have any mistakes on a Canadian flag watch. Of course. And how has that watch been received? I mean, in terms of sales and demand? Okay, you know what? It's received much better than I ever thought. We engraved Adanac on the side because that's Canada backwards. And we engraved the watch. We made only 500 of them. And if you look at the markings on the back, there's an homage to who we are. And it says True North, established in 1867. because that's when the British North America Act was signed and we became our own country. And so, yeah, so the public has responded to this watch?

1:19:12We're almost sold out. What happened this year at the Toronto Timepiece show, they were giving awards, and this watch won the Best International Tool Watch Award. We were already selling very well this watch, and now it's with an automatic, you know, it's with an automatic, it's a beautiful watch. And we designed a strap, a def stand strap, that would complement the watch and not detract from the beauty of the watch itself. It's red and white, just like our flag. and we're almost sold out of this special watch. Indeed, and most of the sales are in Canada, I presume. No. Ah, interesting. Believe it or not, it's not.

1:20:05I think a lot of collectors have bought this watch because, of course, the value goes up with certain watches. The original Navigator and steel my father sold to the U.S. government for$53.75. cents. You're lucky if you could find one for$1 ,500 on eBay without scratches. And I think it was great homage to the country that I belong to. Being Canadian, but being a business that supplies so many international governments, I mean, you know, what does the fact that you are Canadian and it's a Canadian company, I mean, how does that contribute to the mindset and to that, you know, business? I think it's rights.

1:20:51I think the values as a Canadian means that no one religion is better than the other. I think that women are equal to men and they can do the same job as a man. And I believe that ethical values that we have in Canada, I brought forward to in the different countries we do sell and produce. You know, in Switzerland, Women's rights were longer to take up than in Canada. But when I started here when I was younger, although one used to leave the factory earlier to go home to make their husband's lunch. And there was always different years of retirement. But for many years, we were a woman run here in Switzerland.

1:21:44My friend Natalie ran this place. you know you get to know people in different fields but i had a trusted person here who was a friend of mine before she even started working here but became a great confidant and friend of mine and i think it was a great thing i mean there's a glass ceiling when you go into a board of directors at a bank in switzerland you don't see any woman not usually not not not not Not usually, but it has changed. Not as much as in some... But you see, it has changed. And it's a wonderful thing. Well, very good, Mitchell Ween. We will leave it there. But I really appreciate the time.

1:22:24And thank you for giving us some insights into the business of Marathon Watch. Great. Thank you.

1:22:35And that's the business of watches for this episode. We hope you enjoyed. please head on over to hodinky.com where you can join the discussion and leave any comments or questions about this episode or the business of watches in general who knows we might even answer your question on a future episode thanks for listening and see you next time

1:23:13See you next time.