The Private Labels

A fascinating sub-category of watch collecting are the private labels. Personal connections can be made through these pieces for those doing research on their family tree or home town, since most of them bear the name and location of the private jeweler that paid for them to be made. Well over 500 examples from Louis Addor to Frank Zitt have been logged on the charts, sorted by name, state and serial number.

Seth Thomas private labels have so far been reported in Models 1 to 24 from twenty-six of the forty-six US States that participated in the 1910 Census, as well as four Canadian provinces - Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

By Definition

Private label watches were those with the name of a jeweler, local retailer, or even a private group inscribed on it, usually with a specific location of some kind, whether it be a town or a state. Small orders were placed through regional jobbers, who acted as distributors for the factory, in quantities as small as one or two watches and as many as several hundred like New York soap giant Lever Brothers. They could also be contract pieces for large retailers, like the Edgemere for Sears, but for convenience any name/town combination is logged as a private label, while an impersonal name like the Olympia Special, made for Chicago wholesaler Lapp & Flershem, is cataloged as a named grade.

Double-Signed

A double-signed private label is one with matching signatures on both the dial and movement. Any such example is very likely an original combination, though private label movements with factory dials are certainly possible if the customer chose to simply not pay the extra cost of a custom dial. Private labels have been reported as both single pieces within runs and in small blocks.

Factory Cost

Other factories charged extra for special markings, though no prices for this service appears in any of the surviving Seth Thomas catalogs. The matching dials for the various named grades were offered at cost.

Name Within A Name

There were also private jewelers that must have paid extra for a third line of text on the plates to differentiate between whatever marketing names they came up with, such as the Liebenow father-and-son team from Wisconsin in cross-town competition or the Boston firm of the Siegel Brothers with the King, the Workingman's Friend, and others.

Ambiguous Labels

There are private labels that bear just the name of towns or cities, such as the dozen or so from different locations in Colorado, watches with similar names like Lady Elyria, Lady Oshkosh and Lady Winthrop, solo examples such as The Motorman, and the name that almost didn't fit on the watch plates - the Frank, Lauback and Clemmer Company.

Seth Thomas Research