The limited-edition watch Hublot and Novak Djokovic will unveil Wednesday in Paris is lighter than a ball but carries the weight of tennis history.
Packed in the 49 grams of the Big Bang Unico Novak Djokovic are tennis rackets and Lacoste polo shirts worn by the Serbian tennis player during key matches of the 2023 season, which saw him break records by reaching a total of 24 Grand Slam men’s singles titles. He has since added Olympic gold at the 2024 Paris Games.
The player’s gear — 25 rackets and more than 30 shirts — was ground up and turned into a camo-like speckled composite in tones of blue that was used for the bezel and case of the 42-mm timepiece.
“We wanted to do something different, once more original and never done before, and this kind of material upcycling hasn’t,” said the Swiss watchmaker’s chief executive officer Julien Tornare. “And if Hublot and its ‘art of fusion’ doesn’t do it, who would?”
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While the new materials developed for this collaboration are not quite ready for large-scale production, the watch executive said they’d yielded plenty of learnings for sustainability. “We really explored things that we didn’t master and that will lead to technical solutions to materials recycling that we can use in future,” he added.
And if that wasn’t enough, making sure its weight was as minimal as possible was an added challenge. As a collector himself and brand ambassador for Hublot since 2021, Djokovic said that the quality he most admired in a watch is lightness.
“To me, that is the true beauty of having a master timepiece on your wrist — when the time softly nudges you and doesn’t burden you by its weight,” he told WWD exclusively. “When we designed [this watch], we took quite some time to make it reflect that.”
Cue moves that included making the Unico chronograph movement in aluminum, reducing the weight by almost a third, and incorporating the tempered glass used in high-end electronics and twice as light as the sapphire generally used in watchmaking.
“It is now lighter than a tennis ball,” enthused Djokovic. “Whoever is into performance sports can very much appreciate this lightness.”
That’s the kind of nitty-gritty that the ace player said he’d particularly enjoyed in fine Swiss watchmaking that made the development process of the Big Bang Unico bearing his name “quite a special experience to have.”
“Not to be too philosophical, but I can compare my relationship with time with the values of watchmakers. It is all about craftsmanship,” the tennis player said. “Once I mastered my craft and established myself on and off the court as a top competitor, I realized that I also mastered the time.”
And according to Djokovic, there is one final element in each of the 100 watches of this limited edition: the “winning energy” infused by gear worn during his “most special matches” of 2023.
“To reach where I am today, it has required extensive work both physically and most importantly, mentally,” he said. “This new watch is an extension of this mindset and represents key moments from my 2023 season, a landmark year in my career. It is a symbol of every game, every moment.”
Priced at $52,700, the Big Bang Unico Novak Djokovic will come with four straps, including one modeled after a tennis wristband. Also included are a sports wristband and signed polo shirt from Lacoste, as the tennis player has been an ambassador of the French label since 2017.
