Invicta Watches Hitch a Ride on a Weather Ballon: The Public Reacts

IN a marketing move that seems to have fallen flat, the Invicta Watch Company created a rig with cameras to be slung under a weather ballon and launched it. The result: they could have achieved the same result at the local, Hollywood Florida Olan Mills.

I’m not sure exactly what the expectation was other than attempting, all be it way too belatedly, to ride the coat tails of the Felix Baumgartner record breaking jump that occurred back in October.

Details are lacking on the Invicta news page which is interesting because one would think Invicta would be milking this for all that it’s worth, I mean as much as sending watches up on a weather ballon can be milked. Of the 36 timepieces sent up, only pictures of three have been released by Eyal Lalo. Might the others be suffering from failing movements? Might hands be falling off on the edge of space as they appear to do here on Earth? Surely if the images and the high speed video that is promised do not show up, the conspiracy theories will follow.

One suspects that these timepieces will probably be sold at a premium with an official certificate of authenticity that they have been on the edge of space, along with t-shirts and other products.

The public is speaking and not very favorably:

So now Invicta’s Turquoise Dials are Not as Advertised?

BETTERSKILLS combs the Net for information and does find it in really unusual places. So it was quite a moment when I managed to find this latest revelation of Invicta’s questionable marketing on the propaganda site that the watch company finances, watchgeeks.net.

The latest revelation comes from a WG member who purchased the turquoise watch “a few months ago.” It was presented as having a “genuine turquoise dial.” But yesterday, Michael “Fuckin” Davis was presenting the same watch on ShopNBC and fawning over the dial.

So what the hell is Howlite?

It’s a silicate mineral often used to replicate turquoise. In nature, the mineral color is white or grey with dark stripes and a porous structure that allows it to accept dyes uncommonly well. This leads to some dealers pawning it off as real turquoise, which raises the price considerably with some claiming that even jewelers have difficulty telling the two minerals apart. The Mohs scale rating of Howlite is half that of Turquoise typical hardness of five to six meaning that it can easily crumble and fracture.

SO it was first sold as Turquoise, months later as Howlite and on Amazon as Turquoise: “Textured accents and a bold dial give the Invicta Men’s Collection Stainless Steel Turquoise Stone Dial Watch eye-catching style in an easy-to-read design.” Obviously, the original poster feels cheated, and why wouldn’t he? This isn’t the first time that Invicta has been caught making questionable claims regarding a material or origin of a watch; look at just the scandals this year alone.

As expected, one of the Yellow Shirts jumped into the thread with the now worn out refrain of “There’s just not enough time in a day to be worrying about a thing like that.” and “Buy the watch for cheap, and enjoy how it LOOKS.” Personally, I’ve never understood how anyone could seriously accept this logic. How big of a vapid, mindless moron follower yearning for acceptance do you have to be to get screwed and smile, asking for more?

Would you take that stance with a car? A house?

I bet Invicta Watch Company cannot wait for this year of failure and revelation to end. I can’t wait to see what raspberries are in store for next year!