Watch manufacturers, like the nice stadium bands of many years previous, love nothing greater than celebrating their best hits. Whether or not it’s TAG Heuer’s authentic 1963 Carrera chronograph or Vacheron Constantin’s swanky gold 222, each watchmaker with a number of many years of historical past to its credit score (which is most of them) has an archive full of fashionable retro tickers ready to be dusted off and rediscovered. The Armitron Griffy is precisely that breed of watch, and in contrast to the archival gems from the large Swiss luxurious manufacturers, it may be yours in all of its retro-futuristic Nineteen Seventies glory for round 30 bucks.
Based in 1975 by a scrappy immigrant with a knack for entrepreneurship, Armitron is one in all America’s nice watchmaking success tales. Identified for its inexpensive quartz watches and its big clock at Yankee Stadium, Armitron got here onto the scene within the midst of the “quartz disaster,” a tumultuous interval when cheaper and extra dependable quartz designs have been remodeling the trade and threatening the way forward for conventional watchmaking.
Among the many period’s greatest debuts was the LCD digital watch, whose blinking crimson numerals and Six Million Greenback Man vibes have been the head of futuristic cool. Bulova, Hamilton, and a handful of different big-name manufacturers had launched widespread LCD watches earlier within the decade, however these high-tech equipment have been something however low cost (Hamilton’s 1972 Pulsar—the world’s first digital watch—price round $13,000 in in the present day’s cash.) Armitron’s model, nonetheless, provided peak LCD watch fashion (together with a gold-tone case and people large crimson digital numerals) at a fraction of the worth.
Half a century later, Armitron is one of some American-owned watchmakers nonetheless standing, and it nonetheless focuses on inexpensive and sturdy watches designed for the lots. Like Hamilton and Bulova, each of which have lately dusted off their early digital designs to journey the wave of enthusiasm for ‘70s watches, Armitron is again within the LCD recreation, too. The Griffy, the model’s reboot of its best-selling LCD watch, is a devoted tribute to the Nineteen Seventies authentic, with a chunky gold-tone case and outsized crimson numerals that gentle up on the contact of a button. Higher but, like several watch bearing the Armitron title for the final 47 years, it’s priced inside attain of just about everybody—a worth proposition that makes as a lot sense in 2023 because it did within the disco period.
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