Some notes on the oldest watch brands – Kienzle 1822
The history of Kienzle is a history of industrial production and not watchmaking. Kienzle watches have no soul, they’re a mere product, commercialized in the same way peddlers roamed the countryside in a truck to sell cheap household goods to farmers. As puny as it sounds, this made Kienzle one of the biggest watch manufacturers of its time, but at the same time it relegates them today to the pre-check-out cash register baskets in supermarket discounters.
The company later known as Kienzle has its origins in a company founded in 1822 by Johannes Schlenker in Schwenningen in southern Germany - this also explains the addition “1822” on the dial of watches that are manufactured under the Kienzle license today. This is in the beginning years of watch production in the Black Forest (e.g. Junghans).
However, the name Kienzle was not actually adopted until 1883, when Jakob Kienzle married into the family and became a partner in the company, which from then on traded as “Schlenker & Kienzle”. At that time, the company employed around 20 people and produced around 20,000 wall and table clocks annually. Jakob Kienzle became the sole owner of the company in 1897 and renamed it “Kienzle Uhrenfabrik” in 1919.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Kienzle was able to fully streamline production for efficiency and mass production, similar to what the Waterbury Clock Company (Timex) was doing in the USA at the time. Modern manufacturing approaches led to an enormous expansion, with production already exceeding 1 million watches in 1903, manufactured by several hundred employees.
By 1939, Kienzle employed over 3,500 people with an output of 5 million wall and table clocks per year. The company also had a strong position in the field of clocks for luxury car dashboards, particularly for brands such as Rolls Royce and Bentley. Later, Kienzle’s clients will get more: Jaguar, Daimler, BMW, Volvo, Audi, Renault, Ford and Opel will all mount Kienzle clocks. Taximeters and tachographers also are part of Kienzle’s line of products.
Another Kienzle milestone at the time was the Kienzle “Strapazieruhr” (“strain wristwatch), launched in 1931, which - as the name clearly suggests - was intended to be particularly robust. The Strapazier watches were produced in the millions for at least 30 years.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Kienzle already operated a subsidiary in Milan, which was involved in the manufacture of watch cases, the assembly of movements and the distribution of products on the Italian market. This was founded in 1933 as SIOK (Società Italiana Orologi Kienzle) and managed by the Weyler brothers. The two had previously worked in Schwenningen, but the war forced the parent company to close the Italian branch. After the war, the Italian company was rescued by the Weyler brothers, who gradually switched production to wristwatches.
In 1936 Kienzle refurbished busses to showcase their products in different cities, pretty much like a travelling peddler.
The Kienzle caliber 057/21d, the so-called Volksautomatic, came onto the market in the mid-1950s and was the only in-house automatic movement from the Schwenningen watch factory.
In contrast to the hand-wound models from Kienzle, models with the comparatively high-quality Volksautomatic caliber were around three times as expensive, with a selling price of DM 65 at the time. Due to their higher price positioning, the models lay like lead in the shop windows and were removed from the range as early as 1963.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Kienzle became the market leader in Germany in terms of unit sales - with technically exciting in-house developments in the solar and quartz sectors. Nevertheless, Kienzle watches were mass-produced, cheap and were sold at gas stations, among other places. There has always been a lack of strong brand values.
With Kienzle-Swiss, an attempt was also made in a similar period to establish a higher-quality line.
In 1969 Kienzle talks about 25.000 watches being produced daily in 6 different factories, 9 million units per year. Every fourth sold watch in Germany is a Kienzle. But sales were made worldwide, even in the Quartz stronghold Japan.
In 1973, the serial production of the large quartz movement 713 begins. It is the first movement to have all the features that large quartz clock movements manufactured worldwide have today, the 180 degree bipolar converter (clock drive) and the fixed adjustment. KIENZLE has thus placed itself at the technological forefront of “large quartz watch movement manufacturers”.
They did play with the design in an attempt to provide a “different” digital watch.
Kienzle's marketing was still on the cheaper side though....
Nevertheless, it had to come as it had to come: Kienzle - like so many other watch manufacturers - got into difficulties as a result of the quartz crisis and price pressure from the Far East (especially Japan): in 1989, Kienzle Uhrenfabrik was taken over by DUFA (Deutsche Uhrenfabrik). In 1996, the company goes bankrupt.
Just one year later, the worldwide brand rights were sold to the Highway Holdings Group from Hong Kong for 1 million Deutschmarks. The owner: Roland Kohl, an emigrated Swabian. Together with another businessman, Kohl decided to produce watches bearing the Kienzle logo in Asia for the German market. Sales were impressive: Within two years, 750,000 watches were sold.
Kienzle AG was taken over by a German investor in 2006 - this was followed (unsurprisingly) by a strategic realignment and a new head office, which was not located in Villingen-Schwenningen, the former headquarters of the watch manufacturer, but in Hamburg. Even higher-quality mechanical watches were built again. The most expensive model in the “Jakob Kienzle Edition” series: a €18,900 timepiece with a perpetual calendar. Target market: the Gulf region and Asia in particular. In economic terms, Kienzle AG's goal was to exceed the €100 million turnover threshold within three to five years.
Investors speculated that good money could be made by reviving old and familiar brands - as shown by examples such as the VW Beetle. The companies are banking on the positive memories of older consumers, but a historically charged brand story also goes down well with younger consumers. In any case, the plans were quite optimistic: Breyer, CEO of Kienzle AG, was even planning his own factory. The idea was to take over a factory in East Germany (Glashütte?), and plan B was to set up the company's own factory. Company boss Breyer expected 120 to 300 employees and saw potential success on the basis of “fantastic margins” in the watch market with “trade margins up to a factor of six and more”.
Long story short: this attempt at a fresh start was not crowned with success either: just four years later, in 2010, another insolvency followed - according to research by the Schweizer Handelszeitung, this had already happened to a number of companies from the German investor's portfolio.
In the year before the Kienzle insolvency, the brand was transferred to a Swiss company, Rooster Holding from Meggen. While a new Kienzle was being created in Switzerland, even with a distribution company in Hamburg, the insolvency proceedings of the old Kienzle from Hamburg were still ongoing and the creditors were waiting for their money.
For many years, the Kienzle brand lay dormant at Premier Trademarks, a subsidiary of the Independent Watch Group. Status with regard to the trademark register: Cancellation due to non-renewal.
And today? Kienzle wristwatches can be found in Aldi “rummage tables”, advertised with a whopping 74% discount (reduced from just under €80 list price to €20). Bargain alert?
The watches are advertised with the addition “1822”, and the dial also reads “Established in Germany” (in reference to “Made in Germany”), in each case as an allusion to the history of Kienzle. Unsurprisingly, the Kienzle watches at Aldi have absolutely nothing to do with the former Kienzle company: As you can immediately see from the case back, the watch comes from the trading company Krippls-Electronics GmbH in Wels, Austria.
Starting from the import/export business, Krippl has, according to its own statements, increasingly focused on building up a brand portfolio - and Kienzle is obviously one of the brands that the Austrians have licensed.
Now, of course, you could say that Kienzle has always been the cheapest of the German manufacturers (apart from some less successful stints such as “Kienzle Swiss” or “Jakob Kienzle Edition”). It could therefore be argued that selling cheap Kienzle watches through a discounter like Aldi is actually a very good fit. Because, of course, not all consumers attach much importance to history and a higher-quality mechanical inner workings. They simply want a cheap watch that looks good. Period. As you can imagine, the quality of these watches is the lowest of the low.
Nevertheless, as cheap as they are you gotta give some credit where credit is due. The old /original Kienzle did reach market dominance thanks to mass production and a few technological advancements in the digital era (quartz, solar, atomic watches, etc.).
