In the late 1990s, my first brush with product enthusiasm was all about sneakers.
I was, and still am, a huge NBA fan (go Knicks), and I spent my middle school years obsessing over the latest Nikes and Reeboks worn by the likes of Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Penny Hardaway and others.
The best place to learn about these kicks was in the pages of the now-defunct Eastbay catalog. In the days before widespread internet shopping and social media, Eastbay was a Godsend to a kid like me growing up deep in the woods of rural Maine. The catalog showed me what the cool kids in exotic places like California and New York were wearing, and offered me a chance to cop those styles for myself.
Through Eastbay, I also became more aware of accessories outside of sneakers that I quickly coveted, namely Oakley sunglasses and Fossil watches. Hey, it was a different time.
There’s only one specific Fossil watch I remember from that era, as it represented the epitome of cool wristwear to a young teen around the turn of the millennium. It hit the scene when I was in eighth grade, and I vividly remember my cousin and I — he lived down the road and was one year my senior — both obsessing over it when it first appeared in the pages of our respective Eastbay catalogs.
The watch was called the Big Tic, and it was what I would now refer to as an analog-digital watch — but it was a far cry from the usual ana-digit format.
