Review: CIGA Design Blue Planet

If you’ve ever wondered to yourself what all those watch companies that make fake luxury watches could achieve if only they worked on something original, your answer has arrived. Welcome to the award-winning, $2,000, CIGA Design Blue Planet—and it’s pretty special.

CIGA Design

Ever looked at watches that cost many hundreds of thousands—if not millions—and been bowled over by just how innovative, interesting and downright nuts they can be? Not necessarily how practical and wearable they are, rather the sheer expression of imagination on show that makes a Rolex Submariner seem as exciting as a slice of unbuttered bread—the crust to be specific. Watch the comments fill up with people who absolutely love unbuttered crusts …

I get that not everyone loves watches that look like they’ve come straight from the brain of Willy Wonka’s more eccentric watchmaker cousin, but for those who do, for those who like their watchmaking to be as ballistic as an MGM-140, up until now your two choices to get one have been: be rich or be richer. MB&F, Urwerk, Jacob & Co.—amazing works of unrestrained creativity whose only downside is the astonishing barrier to entry.

I get it. Limited runs of wild ideas built to the highest quality aren’t going to come cheap. Urwerk is never going to flog as many UR 100s as Omega is Speedmasters. We’re talking watches that work better in art galleries than they do on wrists here. But would it be so hard if, once, just once, a watchmaker found it in their heart to make an affordable, entry-level watch that exhibits some of the limitless thinking of the big boys?

Industrial Designer Zhang Jianmin had exactly the same thought. Why should oligarchs have all the fun? And so he founded CIGA Design out of Shenzhen, China, using crowdfunding to make watches that bring to life the idea of affordable eccentricity. But you can’t just shoot right out of the gate, guns blazing. You have to earn the right to make nutso watches. It’s a fine line between good nutso and just plain nutso.

And so, since 2012, CIGA Design has slowly been warming a growing audience to more and more outlandish designs, subtly introducing concepts—even with the packaging—that sow the seeds of something bigger. That leads us, like frogs in a hot pan, to this, the Blue Planet. Let me tell you about it.

The Blue Planet

Why are all those crazy watches so expensive? Commonly, because a crazy watch needs a crazy display. An abstract case with normal hands and dial is nothing innovative in and of itself, and so the time and effort required to develop a display that reads in a novel way ends up costing some serious wedge. To benchmark that, developing a basic, time-only movement, using centuries of knowledge, costs about a million dollars, so you can imagine how much you’d have to spend—and therefore charge—to make something completely out there like an Urwerk.

But there is another way. The options are far more limited, the ability to create and explore and develop far more restrained—but it’s possible. Using a basic movement and a whole dollop of upside-down thinking, it is possible to reinvent the traditional time display into something altogether more inventive. That’s where the Blue Planet comes in. Wrought in titanium and packing 46mm of what can only be described as a shape like a flattened squash ball, the Blue Planet is immediately unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. But it’s not the case shape, as unusual and organic the way it blends seamlessly with the domed crystal is, that makes you take pause. It’s the entire planet beneath it.

An Award-Winning Design

The dial is where the ingenuity of the Blue Planet really comes to life, a richly saturated depiction of our home, complete with highly detailed relief that accurately represents the terrain. The way this curved mass occupies the dial, wider even than the chunky rubber strap, gives the watch a quietly awe-inspiring vibe. Seeing the planet beneath the fragile-looking crystal, a pretty decent scale representation of the Earth’s atmosphere as it happens, is a stark reminder of just how vulnerable it—and we—really are.

And that’s exactly the point of the watch, a message that speaks in shapes and colours instead of words. Like a note written on the back of your hand to remind you to take the rubbish out, the CIGA Design sits on your wrist and reminds you to put the banana peel in the organic waste and not the general. It may be a small reminder for a small action, but that’s usually the way big things start.

That’s all very well and good and I’m sure the polar bears will be very grateful, but a watch that doesn’t tell the time isn’t much of a watch. With no hands carving up the globe like a great, astronomical pie, how does the owner of one of these watches deign to know if they are late or on time? Quite simply, as it happens, because floating in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Antarctica is a compass rose. Follow its direction to the outer edge and there you’ll see two orbiting rings, the outer reading hours and inner minutes. Thanks to uprated gearing that spins the minutes at around 1.1 times the usual rate, the time can always be read as a straight line through the compass.

It’s simple, it’s inventive—and the hardest and most impressive part—it avoids being needlessly convoluted. You don’t have to scratch your head for a bit to work out the time. It’s just there, nice and simple. Dare I say it, simpler even than traditional hands and markers. The big case size wears nicely thanks to the shape and lightness of the titanium, and even the basic movement seems well executed. All this for $2,000. This thing should win an award or something.

Not only did the CIGA Design Blue Planet win an award, in 2021 it won the award, the coveted GPHG Challenge Watch Prize for watches that retail at the more affordable end of the scale. This was against the likes of Oris, Doxa, the ultra-hot Furlan Marri and many others. And, as good as the other entrants were, seeing the Blue Planet alongside them made it an easy decision for the judges. To be honest, seeing anything that conceptual and original in the cheap category is basically unheard of. And it’s easy to see why. It doesn’t just challenge our expectations for what can be achieved in affordable watchmaking, it challenges our expectations for Chinese watchmaking, too. And, most importantly, it challenges our mindset towards the world we live on, without which there would be no watches at all.