Doxa

DOXA was founded in 1889 in Le Locle, in Switzerland's Jura mountains, by Georges Ducommun, one of thirteen children who began his watchmaking apprenticeship at just twelve years old in 1880 to help support his family. By 21 he had built enough of a reputation for ingenuity and customer service — he was known to walk twenty-odd kilometres to personally deliver a watch — to open his own workshop, Georges Ducommun, Fabriques DOXA. In 1906 the house adopted the name DOXA, Greek for 'glory,' the year after his pocket watch was honoured at the 1905 Liège World's Fair and the same year his anti-magnetic movement won gold at the World's Fair in Milan. In 1907 he patented the 8-Day DOXA calibre, an automobile dashboard clock with an unusually long power reserve that became standard equipment on Bugatti racing cars and soon spread to instrument panels across the automotive, marine, and aviation industries.

When Georges died in 1936, his son-in-law Jacques Nardin — grandson of Ulysse Nardin — took over, continuing DOXA's focus on travel and sport watches while adding alarms, ring-watches, a date-pointer, and a jumping seconds hand to the catalogue. The 1957 Grafic, a Bauhaus-inspired dress watch, cemented DOXA's design credentials; a decade later, in 1967, the SUB 300 debuted at Baselworld as the first professional-grade dive watch made available to the public, developed in partnership with Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the Aqua-Lung co-inventor. Its patented rotating bezel and bright orange dial — the colour chosen after DOXA's Urs Eschle and diving legend Claude Wesly tested underwater light visibility in Lake Neuchâtel in 1964 — became instantly recognisable, and Cousteau liked the concept enough to negotiate exclusive US distribution through his own company, US Divers, whose watches carried the twin-hose Aqua Lung logo on the dial.

Deep-diving safety followed directly: the 1968 SUB 300T Conquistador was among the first dive watches fitted with a helium escape valve for professional saturation divers, and that same year DOXA introduced the Army, a black-cased, sand-beige-dialled watch built for military use. Between 1968 and 1975 the Swiss Army's newly formed elite diving corps was issued roughly 150 SUB 300T Professionals, each engraved with a serial number matched to its diver's equipment. In 1973, novelist Clive Cussler gave his adventure hero Dirk Pitt an orange SUB 300T, a fictional endorsement that helped cement the watch's identity in popular culture — a relationship the brand still marks today, half a century later.

The advent of quartz brought turbulence, and in 1997 the Jenny family, active in Swiss watchmaking across four generations, acquired DOXA and relocated its headquarters to Biel/Bienne, where it remains under the Walca Group, with Romeo F. Jenny as Board President and Jan Edöcs as CEO since 2019. The Cussler tribute continues in the current SUB 300 Ti5 Clive Cussler, a 300-piece limited edition entirely in grade 5 titanium — case, crown, and NUMA-engraved caseback alike — with a two-level, laser-cut titanium dial revealing Super-LumiNova markers beneath a sandblasted upper layer, its date disc marking Cussler's birthday with the numerals 15, 7, and 31 picked out in orange. Water-resistant to 300 metres and powered by a COSC-certified automatic movement, it is priced at 3,390 USD. At the accessible end of the range, the SUB 200 — offered across eight dial colourways including Sharkhunter, Searambler, and Caribbean, on rubber, steel bracelet, or NATO strap — starts at 1,120 USD, keeping the same rotating bezel and dive-watch architecture that made the original SUB 300 a benchmark in 1967.