A tale of two businesses

Wed, 10/22/2014 - 8:00am

Tony Heyl, of Boothbay Harbor’s A Silver Lining, designed a bracelet in 1999. He named it “The Maine Bracelet.” It comes in silver, gold and brass with a lobster claw that acts as the clasp.

Over the past 15 years the bracelet has become the most iconic piece of jewelry in Heyl's business.

Now A Silver Lining is introducing a new item — the Boothbay Watch Co. watch.

Roger Gordon, who owns the Midcoast Clock & Music Box Company and the Boothbay Watch Co., has signed an exclusive agreement with Heyl to sell Boothbay Watch Co. watches, which he has trademarked.

After having a retail space in Boothbay Harbor for five years, Gordon closed the store a year and a half ago to attend to his clock repair business.

“Our mail order repair business had so much potential we decided to focus on that,” Gordon said. “And it exploded. I don't need a retail space for my business.”

Gordon's corporation is based in Maine, with a workshop in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he spends winters. But his work takes him far and wide.

“We do service work on clocks in nearly every state east of the Mississippi,” he said.

Gordon recently went on a road trip to repair clocks in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, North and South Carolina and Virginia.

“I covered 3,700 miles in eight days,” he said.

With so many clocks having gone digital these days, Gordon said the number of people making and repairing mechanical ones is dwindling.

“A lot of major cities have no one in the business of clock repair,” he said. Gordon said his company is now the factory authorized service center for most major clock brands in the world.

So Gordon travels to homes and businesses to get clocks ticking again.

“I was in two homes in Columbia, South Carolina this past week working on two grandfather clocks,” he said. One was valued at around $9,000 and the other at around $15,000.

“There was no one in the greater Columbia area willing to do the work.”

Gordon said that if he can't repair a clock on site, he, or his son, who works with him, will pull the clock works out and take them to their shop to repair, then take them back and replace in the clock.

Now Gordon has given Heyl exclusive retail rights on his line of Boothbay Watch Co. watches.

Parts for the quartz and mechanical watches are contracted out to several different companies, and Gordon works with designers to come up with exclusive styles. The movements come from two companies in Switzerland and other components are made in the U.S.

Gordon is now working on a “tidal” watch that he said will be accurate to “plus or minus 20 minutes over the course of any given tidal-lunar cycle.” It will be available in two sizes and will show the time, the tides, and the lunar phases of the moon. He hopes to have the watch ready for Windjammer Days 2015.

Heyl said all of the Boothbay Watch Co. watches are of high quality and come with a three-year guarantee. They retail for approximately $100 to $2,500.