For a short time, in the mid to late 1990s, a husband and wife company who designed LCD timepieces for trendy giftshops, were suddenly thrust into the spotlight when a costume designer for Star Trek: The Next Generation happened upon one of these pieces and made it part of Worf the Klingon’s character’s outfit.
Since every trekkie collector suddenly wanted a piece of this kit, sales apparently soared!
You can read about the Trekkie stuff here: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/32367585/santa-cruz-sentinel/ and here: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/11.21.96/trek-jewelry-9647.html
They also made four unique watches at the time, all with the same module but different LCDs — presenting the Grafix Numeral!
You tell the time with the hours around the outside and the minutes in the centre, and every five seconds a dot appears at the appropriate place on the dial to give you an idea of the seconds too. That’s it — no other feature — but what else does it need? It’s a unique, American-designed watch from a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of innovation going on with LCD watches, just improvements on existing technology.
Here are the other variations – Galaxy, Target and Segments.
They’re quite uncommon for two likely reasons – the production run wouldn’t have been huge given that it was a ‘gift store watch’, and they seem to die suddenly and permanently.
This one I found on eBay fully working, so had no qualms about buying it, but of the limited information about these on the internet, there aren’t many of these around and those that are, are mostly broken.
Pretty cool, particularly with the Star Trek tie-in, and certainly something quite unique for its time, and where it was designed.
If you find one of these in working condition, buy it. It’s a bit of fun.
And thanks to The Wayback Machine, you can see how their website looked at the end of the 1990s.