Is your watch made from recycled Lacoste polo shirts and HEAD tennis rackets? Probably not, unless you’re Novak Djokovic rocking your new Big Bang Unico made in collaboration with Hublot. The piece with its tennis ball-shaped pushers was the first between the pair, who have been partners since 2021. The watch sold quickly, according to CEO Julien Tornare, but after working on it for over three years, fans of the partnership won’t have to be that patient before the second Hublot x Djokovic watch arrives.
Hublot and Djokovic are already hard at work on their next collab, and it could hit the e-shelves as early as the end of 2025, Tornare told GQ during an interview during LVMH Watch Week Wednesday. Given the Big Bang Unico Novak Djokovic’s three-year development process, we have to imagine that this sequel model has been in the works for quite some time—maybe even before Tornare, who hopped from TAG Heuer to Hublot in September of last year. But that doesn’t mean that Tornare, one of the watch world’s most talented (and friendly) top dogs, isn’t positively jazzed about it.
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“I didn’t know what to expect when I joined the brand and I did the launch in Paris of [Djokovoc’s] own watch,” Tornare said. “He was super happy, and I already came up with a new idea of the next collaboration we will do with him. He was super excited. So the watch itself got sold very quickly. It’s been a great success. But I have another project to come which might take place, I’m not so sure, at the end of this year—but maybe 2026—which will be a watch to celebrate his whole career in a very special way. So I think we can do a lot more with him.”
Very mysterious! Though the Joker doesn’t wear a watch in play like Nadal does with his Richard Mille models, anything Djokovic straps to his wrist must naturally be something that—at the very least—could conceivably be worn during a match. To that end, we imagine that whatever he and Hublot come up with will be super lightweight, unobtrusive, comfortable, and highly accurate. In his capacity as a brand ambassador, Djokovic has been spotted in all manner of cool Hublots, from tonneau-cased Spirit of Big Bang models to other colorful Unico pieces. Then again, CEO Tornare seems to think that the brand—even in all its esoteric, materials-forward glory—might’ve become a bit too normal these past few years. So perhaps he and the 24-time Grand Slam winner might be cooking up something completely different?
“We feel that Hublot has been one of the biggest successes in the watch industry for the last 20 years, and maybe over the last few years, Hublot, with huge growth, became maybe a little bit too normal, a little bit not differentiated enough from the other brands,” he said. “And Hublot has to be totally different. Hublot has to take a disruptive way, a different approach, so I strongly believe that this is the kind of a strategy that we need to re-inject in the brand, taking the recipes that worked so well at the beginning, 20 years ago. If Hublot becomes too normal, Hublot will not perform. Hublot has to be different, to surprise.”
Tornare won’t find any argument from us. Like ‘em or hate ‘em, Hublot is, in a word, different. Its watches largely don’t look like anything else on the market, and it uses materials and approaches foreign to many other brands, with no apologies to traditionalists. After all, there are plenty of other brands said traditionalists can turn to if they prefer something more staid or unobtrusive. That’s not what Hublot is for. Hublot is for sports watches made from recycled tennis rackets and polo shirts!
“People that buy Hublot, they want to show their singularity, they want to show their difference, and we have to show that,” says Tornare. Tornare mentioned the in-store experience and marketing materials—which recently has shown “the watch on a quite neutral visual,” according to Tornare—as areas where Hublot can think even further afield. A brand experimenting with radioactive shades of proprietary sapphire called SAXEM believes it’s become too normal? We can’t wait to see what different looks like.
