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A few weeks back we featured Hager Watches effort to become an American watch manufacture. They were utilitzing the Crowdfunder website with the hopes of raising $134,000 dollars to first being making a line of Swiss made watches, with further goals towards manufacturing watches within the United States.
If you visit the Crowdfunder page for their campaign you will now see a note that the campaign has not started:
Hager founder Peter Covingtion took to the forums to explain the Hager Watches Crowdfunder situation:
Update on Hager’s Crowdfunder Campaign
“Just wanted to give everyone an update. On Friday we decided to end the Crowdfunder campaign early after consultations with Crowdfunder. Crowdfunder wanted us to extend the campaign but we decided to end it early. While the campaign to raise money for our new Swiss line of watches was unsuccessful, the campaign to raise awareness about America, and Americans competing in this market was a success just based on the sheer number of comments on this board alone. I think this bodes well for American watch companies.
The campaign was also a success in that we have been contacted by two well known American watch companies to see where we can cross collaborate in the future (these aren’t small companies but two of the larger ones here in the U.S., so thank you for getting us noticed). We have also begun looking into possibly producing cases here in the U.S. as well as some assembly.
As many of you are aware our company was financed by owner equity, all of this will take time and money. Speaking of money, I’m waiting on the final statistics from Crowdfunder but I’m told that had everyone clicked through to support the campaign we would have raised close to $55k. Obviously we were asking for far more than we were able to raise.
So where does that leave us and what does the future hold? We will continue to make our two lines of affordable watches, our Swiss line which will be much more affordable when compared to other Swiss watches made of the same caliber, and our Far East line which will also be more affordable for those that can’t afford a Swiss Made watch but yet would still like to own a quality automatic. We will also continue to pursue our dream of producing watches here in the US, and as I stated earlier we will also be looking to partner up with one of the two large American firms who contacted us. This would be a huge deal for us and would bring us one step closer to American Made. We want to thank everyone who supported us in this campaign. While we didn’t achieve the goal that we were looking for we still came away successful. Again, thanks to everyone who supported us in the campaign and God bless.
In the meantime, you can check out our new watch called the Hager S.E.R.E. made for members in a USG Agency limited to 100 PVD and 100 Bead Blasted. These aren’t available to the public yet. You can see it being worn here by Jason Blevins, National Geographic Channel Doomsday Prepper and Author of Survival & Emergency Preparedness Skills, on the TODAY show with Kathie Lee and Hoda here. Beginning in June there will be a Discovery Channel reality tv personality who, he and his team, will be wearing the S.E.R.E. as well on the show. We will also be providing some of the S.E.R.E.s to some of the Special Forces cadre down in FT Bragg for possible inclusion in their kits. The future is bright for us and we hope you will join us in our journey.”
Although it seemed the Crowdfunder project was to allow them to produce the Swiss made watches it appears they will still do so even without the funding they were seeking. So although the actual raising of the desired funds was not successful, in terms progressing Hager’s goals towards continuing to produce watches and beyond the process did provide some useful connections for Hager to leverage.
Source: WatchUSeek
