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Like Detroit Darling Shinola, Skagen Uses Place-Name Association To Sell Watches

This article is more than 9 years old.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Detroit darling Shinola, the 3-year-old watch brand that adopted the shoe-polish moniker as its namesake in a genius branding strategy as the blue-collar-proud purveyor of $900 watches assembled by locally trained workers right in the heart of Motown.

Bruce Weber shot its most recent ad campaign, complete with commemorative coffee-table book; its wares are sold in Barneys New York alongside Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto. The company has done extraordinarily well by basically adopting a hard-luck town as its branding touchstone and associating its watches alongside it.

Well here’s another to add to the list of brands capitalizing on place-name recognition and the particular heritage associated therein: Skagen, a label from Fossil named after a small fishing town in northern Denmark.

Skagen is experiencing a relaunch for 2014 while remaining rooted in the ideals of Danish culture and design. The brand—which also makes handbags and jewelry—has been around a while, but it is redoubling efforts in the watch business, company reps told me last month in Switzerland, freshly infused with new money and a new imperative to play up the Danish relationship. (Fossil, Inc. bought Skagen Designs in 2012 for roughly $225 million and some 150,000 Fossil shares. They showed at the prestigious BaselWorld watch show last month in an effort to bolster brand image and reach.)

The company is based in an unlikely place—Richardson, Texas—with additional offices in the United States, Denmark, and Hong Kong, and the watches themselves embody a minimal, clean look, with very slim encasements and plain, easy-to-read dials. Primary colors on its wares echo nautical landscapes, with natural browns, blues and silver playing predominant roles.

Popular options from Skagen this spring will be the Havene men’s three-hand and chronograph watches with unique steel mesh bands and black, slate and ocean-blue options. Prices start around $125.

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