Crain’s Chicago Business Spotlights Hampden’s Century-Long Legacy and New Era

By Laura Turbay, Crain's Chicago Business

Hampden Watch Brand Director Daniel Wein (left) and CEO Joseph Wein at the company’s "A Century in Time" relaunch celebration at its Chicago’s West Loop headquarters July 12, 2025.

Disclaimer: This article was originally published by Crain's Chicago Business on August 11, 2025. All text and images are the property of Crain's Chicago and are used here for informational purposes only. View the original article here.

Joseph Wein still remembers digging through the dresser of his father, Irving L. Wein, when he was 12 and finding an engraved watch with his father’s initials — ILW — and his serial numbers from when he served in the U.S. Army during World War II. 

The watch was given to him by Joseph’s grandfather Hyman Wein, who founded Clinton Watch Co. in 1922, now named Hampden Watch Co.

“That engraving, the personalization made all the difference, ” said Joseph Wein, Chicago-based Hampden's CEO. “It made a worthless watch into a priceless watch.” 

The memory morphed into the company’s tagline: “All watches tell time. Hampden watches tell stories.

Hampden Watch is the oldest family watch business in America, based on research the company conducted at the Horological Society of New York, one of the world’s oldest horological associations, according to the website. Now, with three generations to its name, the company is preparing to hand the reins to a fourth, with a new focus.

After nearly 25 years of selling as a private label, the Swiss-made watch brand started selling to consumers through select retailers and through the Hampden website this month. The company is marketing itself as a personalized watch brand whose engravings span generations, much like the business itself, which has been passed down for 103 years.

“We are really leaning on sentimentality as a cornerstone of our business,” said Daniel Wein, who saw an opportunity to reopen the brand directly to consumers when he joined the company two years ago. He is the brand director at Hampden and the son of CEO Joseph Wein.

The official launch took place at Hampden's headquarters in Chicago’s West Loop July 12, followed by a party with 300 guests on the building's rooftop. It was preceded by a soft launch in the spring.

The company used to make logos and custom engravings on watches commissioned by various firms like Ford commemorating anniversaries and other events. Hampden is now modernizing its design approach for consumers, while leveraging its vintage style.

“The modern approach is really putting the customer in the driver's seat, ” Daniel Wein said.

Model 2 from Hampden's Centennial Collection shows a personalized engraving on the caseback.

From a handwritten signature to an astrological sign etched onto the watches’ caseback, Hampden’s design concierge can bring a design to life. The caseback is your "design canvas,” said Daniel Wein. Customers can make an appointment with the designer over Zoom to discuss the idea. The process can take anywhere from an hour to a week, depending on the complexity of the design idea, and is complimentary with any watch purchase.

Daniel Wein, 33, is also leaning into watch designs for men. Engravings on women’s accessories have been popular for a long time, he said, “certainly since the Carrie necklace on 'Sex and the City.' "But for men, it's often limited to a monogrammed shirt, he notes. Personalized watches should be “worthy of wearing on your wedding day” and passed down as a family heirloom, he said.

Hampden’s Centennial Collection, launched this month, falls into two general categories: automatic Swiss-made watches (Models 2, 3 and 4) starting at $600, and self-winding mechanical watches with a patented double caseback feature (Model 1), also made in Switzerland and starting at $1,800. The new Clinton line, based on the name Hyman Wein originally gave the company at its founding, will feature automatic watches designed and assembled entirely in Chicago in the $600 price range with a 2026 launch date.

Hampden Centennial Collection, which launched in July 2025.

The company attempted to rename its brand Clinton in 1998, after acquiring Benrus Watch Co. and its name in 1981, but it was during former President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s scandal, so it was called Hampden instead, said Joseph Wein, for a pocket watch maker the company had acquired in the 1950s. One of the earliest American pocket watch makers, Hampden was founded in 1877 in Springfield, Mass., according to the company's website.

The luxury watch business is valued at $7 billion in the U.S. for 2025, according to Euromonitor International, an independent global business intelligence firm. The luxury watch industry counts all watches over $1,000 in price and has seen a trend in personalization continue to grow, particularly among young consumers, including engravings in jewelry and watches.

“The whole point is that you have some engraving done on it — it could be your initials or your birth sign, ” said Fflur Roberts, global insight manager for luxury goods at Euromonitor. “I think everything is kind of being personalized, but also down to the actual shopping experience itself. ”

Consumers are looking for more experiential services in the luxury industry, such as fine dining and luxury holidays. This is also true in the luxury watch business, with consumers looking for the “whole experience of buying a watch, ” Roberts said, such as booking an appointment with a dedicated salesperson that can provide a tailored shopping experience.

Hampden is no stranger to innovation, with over a dozen patents in its century-long history. Casecap is the company’s latest, and involves a double caseback: an exterior removable one, which can be customized with engravings, and an interior caseback that exhibits the inner movements of the Model 1 watch. The feature was created by Joseph Wein and a team of four during the COVID-19 pandemic, and patented in January 2025.

"I've always disliked having to choose between a meaningful engraving and an exhibition caseback," said Joseph Wein in a news release about the invention of Casecap. "So when we set out to design our flagship model, I created a new solution: one that could honor a memory on one side and celebrate horological beauty on the other. ”

A computer engineer by degree, Joseph Wein will also lead a watch assembly class in Hampden’s West Loop headquarters starting in December. A group of six to eight class-goers will learn to assemble watches with parts imported from Switzerland in a laboratory-like setting consisting of microscopes, tweezers, and movement-precision meters to perfect a watch's time up to a millesimal second. At the end of the class, students can take home their Hampden Model 1 watch for a price of $2,000, about the same price of the watch sans assembly class.

Hampden CEO Joseph Wein will hold a class on mechanical watch assembly starting in December at the company's headquarters in Chicago's West (Credit: Laura Turbay)

Before working at Hampden, Daniel Wein worked in marketing communications for Facebook and co- founded a tech nonprofit specialized in big data analytics in 2020 in California, raising $2 million in funding. Since starting at Hampden two years ago, he has helped lead brand and strategy development efforts for the company's watch brands and its sister jewelry brand, Monya.

Joseph Wein, 64, who started as an IT director at Hampden and has been with the company for 40 years, is looking forward to passing the torch.

“I'd love to know that this has been a successful handoff to the fourth generation, and obviously that's a process,” said Joseph. “Danny can't get there in a year, right?”

Joseph Wein took over as CEO of the company in 2002 after his father died, becoming the third generation to lead the watch business.

“In the family business there is kind of a clear succession plan, and it's not something I anticipated until a couple of years ago, ” said Daniel Wein, who lives in New York and has two younger sisters. “For now, it's a family collaboration. ”

The Wein family (formally Weinzieher) is originally from Kiev, Ukraine, in what was once Soviet Russia. Upon emigrating, all five of Hyman Wein’s siblings were involved in the watch business in different parts of the world. Hampden and Marathon Watch Co., founded by Morris Wein in Canada, are still active. Joseph Wein still collaborates with his cousin, Marathon CEO Mitchell Wein, in Canada to assemble watches in Marathon’s Swiss factory.

Now Daniel Wein is looking to take over the long-lived family watch business. “I'm proud of this.

I'm proud of what we're doing. I love working with my son, ” Joseph Wein said.

“Family businesses are complicated in some ways, but they’re incredibly rewarding. So the combination of making a product I’m really proud of — and we’ve made some pretty damn good watches — and doing it now with my son, what else could I ask for?” he said.

Laura Turbay is Crain's Chicago Business' summer reporting intern. She was previously an intern at PublicSource in Pittsburgh covering immigration and labor. Laura graduated from Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York with a focus on business and economics.