Doxa Has Turned Its SUB 200 Diver Into a Diamond-Studded Luxury Watch
Doxa was once the maker of large, heavy, serious SCUBA tools. Now the brand also makes slender, colorful, diamond-paved watches with mother-of-pearl dials. These brand-new models come in various colors and cost $9,400.
Just yesterday we published a story about how Universal Genève might fare now that it is being revived. Such brand revivals are littered with pitfalls. Doxa watches were brought back during the 2000s under the stewardship of collector Rick Marai, who created the template for how to resuscitate a legendary watch brand without breaking its bones: Stay absolutely faithful to the original designs. Get the facts straight. Tell great stories. Engage with the collector community firsthand. Identify passionate fans like James Lamdin and Jason Heaton, and let them spread the gospel.
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In 2019, the Jenny family that had licensed Doxa’s IP to Marai cut ties with the man and began a series of moves that confused the small, passionate Doxa community. That year the company released a solid-gold version of the Doxa Chronograph diver that cost over $70,000. No one seems to have bought one, or even seen one in the wild. Collector friends of mine have suspected that they were melted down, but who knows. Whatever happened to those solid-gold watches, the Doxa community broadly objected to this literal and metaphorical change in tone. As one collector put it to me at the time, that gold watch showed that the brand had become “tone deaf.”
That watch didn’t make sense because Doxa has always been a tool watch company, one able to claim having built the very first commercial dive watch from the ground up. (Dive watches had until then been adaptations of previous models.) Working from scratch led to a bizarre case shape resembling a flying saucer, a legible dial with what now look like Bauhaus markers and hands but at the time were deemed simply legible, and—patented to this day—a dual-scale timing bezel that uses the U.S. Navy’s SCUBA standard to calculate decompression stops while ascending.
I’ve used the famous Doxa SUB 300 to time my decompression stops while diving, and it works like a charm. That’s because the Doxa SUB is a tool watch—designed as such, used as such, and eventually reissued as such. Jacques Cousteau famously endorsed the SUB 300, appearing in numerous films wearing it, and even issued versions in conjunction with his own dive equipment company, Aqualung.
Under the Jenny leadership, Doxa has made strides into other areas of the watch market that are likely more profitable than serving a nerdy contingency of folks nostalgic for the glory days of analog SCUBA diving. In the process, of course, Doxa has upset that community a bit, which was bound to happen—sell-out and all that.
It can be easy for collector communities to express dismay when a watch company “goes sideways,” doing things it never did before and defying what appears like logic. Indeed, replacing the world’s most innovative, useful, and still-patented diving bezel with a bunch of jewels that render the watch useless does seem like a bastardization of sorts. It’s easy for some die-hard adventurer to conclude that Doxa really screwed it up.
But let’s pause for a second and remember that Rolex—the maker of the most iconic, badass, advanced, rugged, and masculine dive watches like the Submariner, the Deepsea, and the Sea-Dweller—has long studded its dive watches with ridiculous amounts of jewels. In fact, Rolex was rolling out solid-gold Submariners with the reference 1608/8 in 1969, right around the time that Doxa was gaining steam. So, if we take an honest look at the analog era when SCUBA diving was still dangerous and mechanical watches were cutting-edge technology, we can see that diamonds and solid gold and all the bling were already there, looking decidedly useless as a tool and totally blingy.
And with that, it’s fair to say that while Doxa’s recent approach hasn’t exactly honored its history as a maker of serious tool watches, it hasn’t really broken with the history of dive watches, either. That’s because dive watches have always also been fashion statements. By the end of the 1990s, just about no recreational diver was using a mechanical watch anyways, so the whole idea of a mechanical dive watch today is a nostalgic exercise in postmodern irony.
Reviving a watch brand based on nostalgia and retro-style doesn’t necessarily mean that the company has to play by the rules of the back catalog only. In fact, Doxa released a carbon-fiber version of its SUB 300 diver a few years ago, and no one balked. Some well-known lovers of the brand were thrilled about the carbon model, in fact. This reaction to the carbon—which bears zero resemblance to anything Doxa did before, or to anything from the 20th century—suggests that what’s motivating negative reactions to Doxa’s use of mother-of-pearl and diamonds on smaller model could be a refusal to accept traditionally feminine tropes.
One could argue that Doxa has done the old “shrink it and pink it” move here, as the SUB 200 is smaller than the 300. But the die-hard dive-watch lovers seemed to love the smaller size, too—as long as it wasn’t girly. Sure, a pink mother-of-pearl dial and rows of useless diamonds can be thought of as girly, but it’s also rather elegant, fun, luxurious, and totally in alignment with the kind of thing Rolex does all the time while never taking any flack for it. And Doxa still makes the big, heavy, dive tools anyways, if you want them.
To learn more, visit Doxa.
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