Blame it on the last year’s devastating crypto market crash but the world seems to have quickly fallen out of love with NFTs (non-fungible tokens). However, luxury watch brand Hublot seems to be in no hurry to abandon it just yet. The Swiss watchmaker has expanded its collaboration with celebrated artist Takashi Murakami to introduce a new project that involves more NFTs and exclusive watches. Hublot and the famed Japanese artist recently revealed a bespoke colorful watch called the Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami Black Ceramic Rainbow. This one-off creation will be followed by 12 more watches that will debut at the upcoming Watches & Wonders 2023 expo along with 12 unique NFTs.
The newest collaborative effort between Hublot and Murakami represents the fusion between art and technology and blending it with the digital world of NFTs. All 13 watches put a three-dimensional version of Murakami’s iconic smiling flower design right at the center of the dial, rendered in different colors with the help of different gemstones. The rainbow version is said to be inspired by the previous collaborative pieces and by Japanese video games from the 1970s. The dial gets a smiley face in the center surrounded by 12 petals. Each of them is studded with gemstones of different shades, which include rubies, sapphires, amethysts, tsavorites, and topaz. The rest of the 12 watches in the series are individually rendered in one of those 12 shades.
All 13 watches feature the same 45mm black ceramic case and are powered by Hublot’s manufacture Unico Caliber which offers 72 hours of power reserve. In case you’re interested in buying any of the watches from the series, it might prove to be quite challenging. The 12 yet-to-be-revealed watches and their corresponding NFTs will only be sold to those who own the 324 NFTs the watch brand issued last year in collaboration with Murakami. All 12 watches and the NFTs will only be sold via Hublot’s official website, each watch-NFT combo priced at CHF 50,000 (about $54,000). Procuring the Rainbow version is going to be a lot more difficult. For that, you’ll have to be in possession of the 12 new NFTs by April 2024. If no one is able to unite all 12 NFTs, Hublot will ultimately auction the watch for charity. It’s actually a very interesting way of not only protecting the value of the brand’s old NFTs in circulation but also inflating their demand in the marketplace.
