As I mentioned in my previous Nixon post, they’re a brand that aligns themselves with skate-, snow- and surfboarding. To that end, they actually sponsor their own surfing championship the Winner Take All. The final stop of that tour is in Hawaii on December 8th, and Nixon was whipped up a custom watch for the winner.
They started off with their ceramic 51-30 model (which itself has a starting point of $2,600), which has these basic specs:
- Automatic Swiss-made mechanical movement; 25 jewels
- 3 hands with sweeping seconds
- 300m water resistance
- Ceramic in the body (it has a steel “skeleton”), bezel, and screw-down crown
- Sapphire crystal up front; mineral crystal window on the caseback
In many ways, the basic 51-30 looks like a “big brother” to the 42-20 I wrote about earlier. Of course, for the WTA series winner, they’re getting a watch of a whole different nature. To start off with, there are a lot of jewels added to it, including:
- 50 black diamonds on the bezel
- 6 black sapphires and 95 black diamonds on the dial
The standard logo at the 12 o’clock position has been replaced with the Hawaiian flag (to commemorate the last stop of the tour), and there has been some additional engraving added to the case back and side. All in all, Nixon is valuing this particular watch at a cool $10,000.
I’ll admit, I’m not normally one to like a watch that’s loaded with gems (see my previous post on an Omega for example), but in this case, it does work well. I think it’s a bit overboard to have the bezel and dial SO loaded, but even with that, it doesn’t seem as “blingy” as diamond-encrusted watches seem to be.
I had no idea that something like a black sapphire even existed, so there you go – the watch is even somewhat educational. And, if you happen to run into Joel Parkinson (the winner for the past three years) you might even get to see the watch in person.
