Wristwatches Get the Back of the Hand

KTLA picks up a Los Angeles Times article that finds "young shoppers are shunning watches for snazzier time-telling gadgets, such as cellphones and iPods." According to the article, "the number of people who bought watches not in the Rolex and Patek Philippe stratosphere dropped 12% from 2004," and the favorite brand for teens, Fossil, "acknowledged an 18.6% decline in wholesale U.S. sales of its namesake brand."

The article writes about the various reasons people are no longer wearing wrist watches. Marshal Cohen at NPD Group commented that "many older people too would make the cellphone their primary timepiece if it didn't mean digging around for their reading glasses." He said, "Once the cellphone manufacturers recognize that not everybody has X-ray vision, they'll begin to make the cellphone clock a little bit bigger and it will very quickly replace the fashion watch as the No. 1 timepiece."

A report from Piper Jaffray found that "teenagers who said they never wore a watch rose to 59% from 48%. The number of teens who said they wore a watch daily declined to 13% in this spring's survey, compared with 18% of those polled in the fall. And 82% said they didn't plan to buy a watch in the next six months, compared with 76% last fall."

Neely J.N. Tamminga at Piper Jaffray said, ""No matter how you sliced the data, it looked incrementally worse for the fashion watch industry when catering to teens. The punch line for us is, clearly, the teens are using other means to tell time."

Rob Callender at Teen Research Unlimited found that 87 percent of teens use their handsets to tell time. He said, "The watch turns into something that's completely incidental to their lives."

Many think will be even more linked as a fashion/status statement. Nitin Gupta at the Yankee Group said, "People usually don't buy a Rolex just to tell time."

The article points out the multiple functions the cell phone can perform beyond just making calls and telling time. David Chamberlain at In-Stat said one potential area is "targeting older consumers who are "a little techno-phobic," and noted "at least one company has a stripped-down cellphone (no camera, video, text messaging or wireless connection) that sports larger numbers and a bigger screen."