Don Bennett Time Is Right For Watch Retailer With Expanding Chain Of Stores

Time is on Don Bennett’s side.

His chain of watch, clock and sunglass stores has ticked to 10 in number less than three years after he opened the first one in Issaquah.

And 23 years after a boating accident severed one leg and severely damaged the other, he remains a dynamo in and out of his Watches by Gosh shops.

The newest outlet, in downtown Spokane’s Crescent Court, opened last Monday. Another opened in July in Coeur d’Alene.

Watches by Gosh sparkle with bright lights playing on fanciful arrays of timepieces that Bennett says attract shoppers weary of bending over glass counters.

Most of the displays are at eye level, with many dangling from pegs where the watches can be taken down and tried on without the aid of a clerk.

Despite the easy access, Bennett said pilferage is minimal. “There’s always someone who’s going to get you for a few watches,” he said.

Watches by Gosh carries about 15 major lines, like Fossil and Perry Ellis, and between 300 and 400 fashion designs, Bennett said.

To augment summer sales, the stores also carry Maui Jim sunglasses.

Bennett said he took the unique approach to selling watches from a trade show he attended in Los Angeles in 1992. The watches were hung on pegs with numbers attached, and wholesale buyers would simply stroll past the displays and call out the number and quantity of watch they wanted.

“This is the way you should sell watches,” he recalls thinking.

Bennett ordered watches from some of the wholesalers he’d seen in Los Angeles, leased a site in Issaquah and opened the doors.

Despite the lack of a cash register, he said the store had a fabulous first day.

“I made change out of my back pocket,” he said. “I knew I had a winner.”

Except for a misstep on a Bothell location, Bennett’s progress has been as calculated as clockwork.

Watches by Gosh swept through the Seattle area with four more stores, added two in Oregon, then jumped to Mountain Time with a location in Sun Valley.

The Crescent Court store puts him ahead of the curve in the rejuvenation of the city’s core, he said. “I feel that downtown Spokane has just got so much potential.”

Bennett will run the new store himself for a few months, as he has with each location. And he said he expects to open a few more stores in Eastern Washington next year.

In the meantime, Bennett has transplanted himself into a hilltop log home outside Coeur d’Alene. He moved from a home near Lake Washington, the site of the 1972 accident that cost him his leg.

The incident and recovery that followed were turning points in his life, he said.

First, he sold one business and started another, Video Training Centers, that came to have a library of 2,000 instructional tapes covering everything from sexual harrassment to leadership.

He sold that business in 1992.

And he decided to resume skiing, in which he had competed while serving with the U.S. Army in Italy.

Bennett said relearning the sport was so frustrating he had almost given up when he found an amputee skier in Portland who taught him how to ski anew.

Bennett, in turn, became an instructor at Snoqualmie Pass, all the while working on developing his own skills. By 1980, when the first amputee ski meet was held in Colorado, he had progressed so far he brought home gold and silver medals in slalom and giant slalom.

That, said Bennett, set him thinking about other things he could do. He decided to put his mountaineering experience to work on a bid for the summit of Mt. Rainier, which he had scaled in the past.

On his first attempt, in July 1981, Bennett and his team were turned back by weather just 400 feet from the top. A bitter Bennett said he had little stomach for repeating a training regimen that had included five miles of hopping each day with the aid of special steel-tipped poles.

But a year later, goaded by news accounts that called his first try a failure, he and a team of five friends reached Rainier’s crest.

“It was one of the greatest memories of my life,” he said.

But that was not Bennett’s last athletic hurrah. In 1985, he summoned a few friends to Mercer Island for a game of soccer played on crutches.

The next week more showed up. Bennett said he got dozens of odd shoes from the Athlete’s Foot, and other help from the director of the Seattle Sounders.

Bennett established Amputee Soccer International, and he and other team members traveled to England, Brazil and El Salvador to teach and organize new teams.

The Soviet Union embraced the game as a form of therapy for thousands of troops wounded in the Afghanistan war.

After an initial international tournament in Seattle in 1990, the Soviets hosted the second in Tashkent the following year with Olympic-scale festivities.

Bennett said he received a trophy for being the world’s oldest soccer player from the hosts, but that was not his greatest satisfaction.

“I really felt good” watching the competitors, he said. “They were back in the arena again.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo