A $5 Columbia Field Watch

Another #GoodwillFind brought back to life...

Apr 25, 2024

Columbia is a brand known not for their watches, but for their outerwear and ski jackets.

Back in 2010, the Oregon company decided it wanted to get into watches, announcing in a press release:

Columbia partnered with the talented design team at Adao Global of Austin, TX to develop a collection that would translate the brand equity that Columbia has earned in the outdoor industry into the watch and outdoor instrument industry.

Adao Global was founded a mere six years earlier, eventually being acquired by another company five years after this press release. The founder, David Arnold, couldn’t make the company work.

“The initial launch”, the press release states, “will consist of 10 styles with a total of 36 watches.” Among the styles:

Individual products within the line feature various combinations of Altimeters, Barometers, Compasses, Thermometers, Tidal Reads, Moon Phases, Sunrise/Sunset predictors, Ski Timers, Sail Timers, Hydration Alarms, Interval Timers, Lap memory, and Chronographs. Each instrument features a robust, durable design with an aesthetic inspired by the spirit of the Greater Outdoors.

During my periodic watch searches of the ShopGoodwill website—which I highly recommend as a place to take some low-stakes risks on what is in a sense watch gambling—I came across this brown dial field watch. No bids. $4.99. Seemingly brand new.

And since 2024 is the year of the Brown Dial (or is it white?), I figured I would bid $4.99 and see what happened.

I was skeptical, but willing to take a chance. Nothing happened. I won, and this bandless reference, CL7005 came to me from rural Texas.

You can find it or its brethren for between $10 and $40 on eBay. Arriving, the watch was seemingly unworn, still with its protective coating on the watchback. Perhaps the previous owner really liked the band.

A watch like this probably cost $75 MSRP, based on this hype post when the line launched. The more feature-rich watches went between $150 and $250. Update: That’s assuming this watch comes from the Adao Global era. A WatchCrunch user tells me his wife bought his at a department store in the earlier aughts, maybe 2005-6, for closer to $50 or less. And it came with a leather band.

When the watch arrived, I quickly set up my low-budget workshop (judge away) and changed the battery, which was a breeze, and we were ticking away. The bezel rotates, with the additional button on the dial illuminating the face. The hands and hours are all lumed, and despite its age, held illumination for a good period.

As it turns out, this model, and a few of its siblings, have a small following on WatchCrunch.

I couldn’t find any records about when the Columbia-Adao relationship halted, but Columbia has partnered, now, with a company founded in 2017, the Phantom Brand Group, to make their watches. Which they’re also co-co-branding with colleges. You can find the somewhat handsome “Outbacker” model, with rotating dial compass, on Amazon.

But with this guy, I’ll enjoy some adventures in the outdoors with that late aughts bezel, a sobered up, more serious version of the monster-y bezels of the early aughts.

—Casual Time #8 by Jim Swift