Luxury Swiss watchmakers RJ-Romain Jerome have made meticulous, fascinating watches since 2004. Now, they’re collaborating with Pokémon. The results aren’t so pretty.
If you want quickly understand what kind of watches RJ-Romain Jerome makes and who those watches are for, let this sentence wash over you: In 2012, they made a watch that contained materials from the Titanic. Their Pokémon collaboration is perfectly normal by comparison, even though it costs $258,000.
The problem is it’s ugly. It’s really ugly. It looks like a bad marketing campaign threw up on someone’s wrist. The website boasts amazing technical features that are genuinely impressive—laser engraving, a tourbillon bridge shaped like a lightning bolt, a Pikachu shaped oscillating weight. If you’re hella into watches, that may justify the price tag to you. But it turns out that cramming every single well known Pokémon onto a small circle is a unholy mess of colors and patterns that kinda makes me dizzy. Maybe they wanted to make sure the customer gets their favorite Pokémon on the face of the watch, but it kind of looks like the cute monsters suffocating and trying to escape it. When you’re paying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for a watch, simple stuff like, “being able to tell the time,” and “not looking like reheated shit,” might be small considerations. But for a rube like myself, they matter.
Luckily, RJ-Romain Jerome has made another Pokémon watch, and it’s much cuter. It’s only got Pikachu on it instead of trying to cram in every single Pokémon under the sun, and its design feels more balanced. That one runs for a paltry $20,000. Oh boy!