So the question has been asked -
"Why does the OBIE1 cost $97.97?"
Even:
"Why does the OBIE1 only cost $97.97?
Full disclosure? While we could have priced it higher, we couldn't price it any fairer. And a big part of this idea was (once again) not mine originally. Going back to the last part of the 1800s, the Ingersoll brothers came up with the idea of selling a watch for $1. This was more than a small amount of change back then, but the idea was to make a watch that pretty much anyone could afford. So the brothers purchased 10,000 watches from the Waterbury Clock Company for .85 each, leaving them a margin of .15 per watch. And that means that if everything went off without a hitch (which it most certainly did not) they might walk away with $1,500.
My idea, while not that dramatic, was to offer a good and reliable watch at a reasonable price. And this meant that we had to be creative in terms of the packaging -
In the spirit of conservation as well as out and out thrift, we were able to purchase watch boxes from another watch company's project that were going to be thrown away. So with a little bit of imagination, and several cans of spray-paint, we upscaled these cast-offs and our unique Oberlin Watch Company packaging was born!
Each box was painted, one at a time by me. Each one is different, and it ensures that your OBIE1 will be truly unique ; )