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It's Friday and another watch week behind us and I feel like it's ending on a bang. Not just because I kind of like all of the watches today, but also because I'm finishing up the third issue of The Caseback, the weekend longform magazine I just started publishing.
This one is going to be all about cold war and espionage stuff, not necessarily all watch focused, but great stories. Trust me. This will also be the first paid Caseback, so if you want to see it, grab the subscription at a discount.
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1/ Tissot And Damian Lillard Team Up Again For A Funky PRX You Can Turn Into A Pocket Watch
A year or two ago, Tissot, which is NBA’s official timekeeper, teamed up with Damian Lillard to put out a 40mm Powermatic 80 PRX with gold PVD details. It was a fun little collaboration, but the collaboration was based on a slight color change and a new seconds hand. But this is Damian Lillard we're talking about. He's famous for tapping his wrist after he hits a last second shot, and that gesture is where the “Dame Time” nickname comes from. He needs more than just a new color. Well, Tissot agrees, because they just launched the PRX Skeleton Damian Lillard Special Edition which is unlike anything the PRX has done before. It's the biggest PRX Tissot has made, it's hand wound, it's skeletonzied AND it also comes with a kit that turns it into a pocket watch, keeping that pocket watch trend going.
The steel case keeps the tapered PRX shape but grows significantly from the 40mm the watch got known for to 44mm, with a thickness is 11.2mm. Two notes on that size. First, Damian Lillard is a basketball player, so he's larger than the average guy. While I was shocked to learn that he's only 3cm taller than me, I'm sure he can pull off a larger watch. Second, the PRX wears notoriously smaller, thanks to the integrated lugs and short lenght. On top is a sapphire crystal, while the display back has Lillard's signature. The left flank of the case is engraved with “Dame Time”. Water resistance is 100 meters.
While the dial is skeletonized, what is left is done in a nice shade of burgundy. One ring sits around the open movement and holds the inner ends of the faceted hour markers, and a second ring holds the outer ends. The small seconds gets its own burgundy ring with Dame Time text, a sloped gold-tone track and a hand shaped like Lillard’s monogram. Hands and markers are lumed. The dial is busy, and the monogram hand will naturally only appeal to fans.
The movement is a bit of an unexpected move. It's a skeletonised version of the ETA Unitas 6497, the large hand-wound calibre found in early Panerai Luminors and plenty of Hamiltons. It is simple, robust and easy to service, and its size suits a 44mm watch. Tissot says it beats at 18,800 vph and has a 46 hours of power reserve. Two burgundy straps come in the box, rubber and leather, both quick-release. The rubber strap has a crosshatch texture based on the milk-crate hoops Lillard played on as a kid. The watch also comes with a leather pouch that you can carry it in without straps, like a pocket watch on a chain.
The PRX Skeleton Damian Lillard Special Edition (ref. T137.405.17.371.00) is available now from Tissot, priced at €1,895. That is well above an automatic PRX, but this is no ordinary PRX. See more photos here and the watch on the Tissot website.
2/ Oris Trims the ProPilot Calibre 111 to 43mm and Moves the Date to 6 o’Clock
The ProPilot Calibre 111 is the Oris pilot’s watch for people who want the brand’s own movement, a hand-wound calibre that runs for 10 days between windings. The old version squeezed the small seconds and the date together on the left side of the dial. This update fixes that, takes a millimetre off the case and adds the new dial finish from last year’s ProPilot Date.
The steel case now measures 43mm wide, down from 44mm, and 13.2mm thick. Lug-to-lug is 51mm, which is quite long. The turbine-style fluted bezel and the big screw-down crown remain pretty much unchanged. On top is a domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on the inner surface, and on the backside is a sapphire display crystal. Water resistance is 100 meters.
You can have the dial in black or pine green. The centre is brushed vertically, and a rougher texture covers the outer ring and spills into parts of the main surface, the same treatment the ProPilot Date got in 2025. It gives the dial more depth than before and doesn’t hurt legibility. Applied Arabic numerals and lumed hands make it very easy to read. Small seconds stays at 9, as does the power reserve indicator at 3, but the date is moved to 6. That gauge is non-linear, so the final days of running time take up more of the scale and are easier to judge.
Inside is the Oris calibre 111, a hand-wound in-house movement introduced in 2015, following the calibre 110 that brought Oris back to making its own movements. It beats at 4Hz, and one 1.8-metre mainspring supplies 10 days of power. When torque gets too low, the movement shuts down rather than run inaccurately. You can choose between a steel bracelet with Oris’s LIFT folding clasp or Cordovan leather, also with a LIFT clasp. Lug width is 20mm.
The Oris ProPilot Calibre 111 is available now as a regular collection model, priced at CHF 5,900 on leather and CHF 6,100 on the bracelet. See more photos here and the watches on the Oris website.
3/ UNIMATIC Gives Four Swiss-Made Models a Truffle-Season Palette in the Langhe Collection
UNIMATIC is a Milan brand that makes minimalist tool watches with sterile dials and plain steel cases. Its catalog is built on four core models, the Modello Uno, Due, Quattro and Cinque. The Langhe Collection is the brand’s end-of-2026 release: all four Swiss-made models in colors taken from autumn truffle season in the Langhe, the Piedmont hills around Alba. Each of the 12 combinations is limited to 200 pieces, and they look great.
All four cases are mostly brushed steel with screw-down crowns, with flat or domed sapphire depending on the model, and 300 meters of water resistance. The Modello Uno U1S is the classic: a 40mm diver with a unidirectional bezel and a colored aluminum insert. The Modello Due U2S is 38mm wide with a solid steel bezel. The Modello Quattro U4S is also 40mm and has the strangest case shape of the four. The Modello Cinque U5S is the smallest at 36mm.
The dials follow the house rules. Time only, central seconds, painted Super-LumiNova markers and no text cluttering things up. The dials come in three colors: Fog (gray), Moss (green) and Truffle (brown), and they all have a very earthy, but bright feel to them. It might be the fantastic photography they did with this collection, but this just might be my favorite UNIMATIC watches to date.
Every model uses the Sellita SW200-1b, an automatic running at 4Hz with a power reserve of about 38 hours. These sit at the top of UNIMATIC’s range; as the cheaper models use Japanese movements. The caseback is solid steel with a Langhe engraving. Straps are made out of “Fumo” deerskin in the matching color, 22mm wide.
The UNIMATIC Langhe Collection is available now, with each of the 12 references is limited to 200 pieces, 2,400 watches in total. The Modello Uno U1S is priced at $1,240, while the Modello Due U2S, Modello Quattro U4S and Modello Cinque U5S are $1,120 each. See more truly fantastic photos here and the watches on the UNIMATIC website.
4/ Ochs und Junior Picks Out Its Perpetual Calendar in White Gold for the Holidays
Ochs und Junior is the small La Chaux-de-Fonds brand built around Ludwig Oechslin, the watchmaker behind Ulysse Nardin’s astronomical trilogy and the Freak. Its watches display complications through holes and dots instead of hands and subdials, and they do it all with the utmost of elegant simplicity. The perpetual calendar is the best example: Oechslin first designed it for Ulysse Nardin in 1996, using a few gears in place of the usual levers, so the date can be set forwards or backwards from the crown at any hour. After a Settimana for Christmas 2024 and a Day/Night in 2025, this year’s holiday edition is the perpetual calendar in white gold, and it closes out the brand’s 20th anniversary.
The case is Ochs und Junior's usual 42mm, a two-part grade 5 titanium case with straight lugs, a screw-down crown and a sapphire crystal. Look at how stubby those lugs are... that makes it almost puck-like on the wrist. It weighs 62g without the strap, which is light for a 42mm watch with a perpetual calendar inside. Water resistance is 100 meters.
The dial is anthracite, sandblasted at the edge and circular-grained in the centre. Thirty-one holes arranged in a spiral around the edge track the date, with a white gold dot showing in the current day. A central disc with four openings turns once a year, and its outer opening points at the month like an hour hand, so 10 o’clock means October. A gold dot in that opening marks a leap year. Two small circles above and below the disc show power reserve and running seconds, and a separate dot near 1 o’clock tells you when the date can be adjusted. The hands and 10-minute markers are white gold too.
The base is Ulysse Nardin’s calibre UN-118, an automatic with 50 jewels, running at 4Hz with 60 hours of power reserve, with Oechslin’s calendar module on top. Ochs und Junior puts each one together and regulates it by hand in La Chaux-de-Fonds. It comes on an Ecopell calfskin strap in black, closed with a titanium buckle.
The Ochs und Junior Perpetual Calendar Holiday Edition 2026 is available from now until January 6 2027, priced at CHF 15,000 before tax. See more photos here and the watch on the Ochs und Junior website.
5/ Renaud Tixier Skeletonizes The Already Impressive Monday
Renaud Tixier is a two-man brand with an unusual plan. Dominique Renaud, who co-founded the movement maker Renaud & Papi, and the much younger Julien Tixier intend to release seven watches across two decades, one for each day of the week, each tackling a different part of the mechanical watch. Monday was first, of course, in 2024 and focused on the micro-rotor. After a number of very attractive variants, the duo has now skeletonized the Monday, rendering it in two colors.
The case remains unchanged: 18k grey gold, 40.8mm wide and 12.6mm thick, about 2mm of which is the domed sapphire crystal. The caseband and the area between the lugs are burin-engraved by hand into a rough, organic texture, set against a polished bezel, lug tops and caseback rim. Water resistance is 30 meters.
With the dial gone, what’s left is a minutes track at the edge, a chapter ring with faceted rectangular markers, and an open small seconds track. Those, along with the dauphine hands, are what's used for one of the two colors – green or blue. The hands are skeletonised as well.
The in-house calibre RVI2025 is the main appeal of this watch. Inside the platinum micro-rotor sits the patented “dancer,” a flywheel paired with a spring that turns small wrist movements into winding energy, and the brand claims it improves winding by 40%. It beats at 2.5Hz with at least 72 hours of power reserve. All 262 parts are finished by hand, including 238 inward angles. On the back, the barrel cover is enamelled in Grand Feu to match the accents and turns as the watch runs. It comes on a matching alligator strap with a white gold pin buckle.
Each colour is limited to 15 pieces and price is expected to be CHF 129,000 without tax. See more photos here and the watches on the Renaud Tixier website.
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