Like most great ideas, this one happened by accident.
Back in 1961 a man walked into one of our jewelry stores and bought a very large emerald ring for his wife. He was very happy with the purchase and called Larry Abels directly several months later. We were hoping he wanted some earrings or a pendant to go with the ring. Instead he asked if we could sell him some Omega watches for the people in his company. The company was Cities Service (which became CITGO). He was the Executive Vice President and he wanted to reward the 25 year employees with watches. A little unsure and overwhelmed, we said "Of course". Then he asked if we could customize and engrave the watches with the employees names for him. We figured we could have it done some how and we did.
The rest is history! We merged our 50 jewelry stores with the Bailey, Banks and Biddle division of the Zales Corporation and spun off the watch division in 1980.
45 years and millions of watches later, Selco, "The Original Logo Watch Company" is the premiere watch company in the promotional products industry and the only member of the American Watch Association. Today we manufacture watch dials in the US, not only for our Selco Genève and A*Belle lines, but for many famous retail lines such as Seiko and Raymond Weill. We are still family owned and operated: Larry Abels (2nd Generation) is Chairman and Mark Abels (3rd Generation) is President and CEO and we are still personally taking care of our great distributors, many of whom are good friends.
Now we are very ready for another 45 years in the promotional products industry.
