How a Watch Nobody Saw Coming
Beat Rolex and Omega to the Bottom of the Ocean
A History & Review by Rico (@ricoswatches)
DISCLAIMER:
First things first: I did not buy this watch, it was provided to me for the purpose of writing this article and to act as an index point marking the beginning of what I expect to be a long-term relationship between Ollech & Wajs and the SBWC. Charles (the owner of O&W) is an impressive and passionate man with a long history in the watch space. When I had the chance to speak with him on the phone some time ago, I knew that I was talking to a true watch guy. Someone who “got it” and who genuinely cared not only about his brand, but also about the hobby, the community and its people. That is the kind of brand I want the SBWC working with and also the type of brand I want us to be. So this review is a natural fit.
All that aside, I hope you find this article informative and enjoyable. I will try to be unbiased in my review of the watch, but honestly, I can say that it is very impressive and punching above its weight class. The current price of the watch as reviewed is $2492 USD on the beads of rice bracelet.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
I came to Ollech & Wajs the way I think most people do, sideways: through a forum thread or a Reddit post where some guy posts a beat-up vintage diver and says “anyone know what this is?” and three people lose their minds in the replies. I’d never heard of the brand at the time. But I remember being taken aback initially by the unique logo and name, proportions of the case and something about the thin bezel captured inside of a thick steel ring surrounding a seriously domed crystal. I was looking at a vintage Ollech & Wajs Caribbean 1000. That was many years ago, the beginning of a journey that would take me down a rabbit hole I never expected to go down.
Here’s the thing that got me, though, and it’s not nostalgia or the unique style of the watch. It's math. In 1964, when Rolex was still working out the kinks on the Sea-Dweller and Omega’s Ploprof was years away from existing, a tiny Swiss outfit running out of an office in Zurich, not a manufacturer, not a factory, an office built a watch certified to 1,000 metres. The big houses were still fighting over 300. That’s not a footnote. That’s a watch company punching so far above its weight class it’s almost embarrassing for everyone else in the room.
So when I started seeing the modern C-1000 pop up on enthusiast wrists, guys who actually dive, not just guys who own dive watches, I had to do the history lesson properly. Buckle up. This one has got NASA, the Vietnam War, a TV cop show, and a guy who bought a brand from his own mentor because he refused to let it die. It’s a lot.
HISTORY & CONTEXT: ZURICH, 1956, AND THE WATCH THAT
EMBARRASSED THE INDUSTRY:
Let’s take a moment for a history lesson, because Ollech & Wajs deserves a real one and almost nobody has provided one. The brand started in 1956 in Zurich, when Albert Wajs, who’d been supplying stainless steel watch bracelets to companies, partnered up with his friend Joseph Ollech to open a watch shop. Not a watch company. A shop. They sold Breitling and Omega off the shelf, the way any retailer would. Then, like every good origin story in this hobby, ambition and stubbornness took over and the two of them decided to start putting their own name on the dial instead. Thus, Ollech & Wajs Zürich (OWZ) was born, and the design brief from day one was simple: rugged, accurate, no-nonsense sports watches, sold direct by mail order to cut out the middleman. That mail-order model is honestly underrated as a piece of brand DNA. O&W was running a microbrand business model in the 1950s, decades before “microbrand” was a category anyone even had a name for.
Ollech & Wajs wasn’t marketing to or making watches for collectors. They were aiming at people who needed a tool. According to O&W’s own account, the brand’s pivot into military-grade watches came from a young American GI stationed in Switzerland who told them, essentially: “make something solid enough to replace the junk we’re issued, and we’ll buy it.” So, in 1964, and yes, I know I’m jumping ahead of myself (more on that watch in a second), O&W started targeting American servicemen directly with their marketing. It worked. By the back half of the 1960s, GIs in Vietnam were buying O&W watches out of pocket because they trusted them more than what they were being issued, and the brand’s own history credits the Vietnam era as its commercial high point.
The M65 (O&W’s military-spec field watch) became, per the brand, the most widely used non-issued watch among American troops in Vietnam. Read that again: non-issued. Soldiers weren’t told to wear it. They chose to, with their own money, because the issued gear wasn’t cutting it. That’s the kind of credibility you can’t manufacture with a marketing budget; you earn it one soldier at a time, in a jungle, in 1967. At the brand’s peak production in the 1960s, O&W was producing more than 10,000 watches a year. That is a lot, even by today’s standards. It is the company’s own internal estimate that they sold nearly 50,000 watches just to GIs alone and that 80 to 90% of their total production were sold exclusively to military or working professionals such as commercial divers. Very few of their watches made it into the hands of traditional retail customers.
Now, the part that makes watch nerds like us sit up straight: in 1967, O&W released the Astrochron, a triple-register chronograph named for the space race itself. In the later '60s, outer space was the frontier everybody was racing toward. The watch earned a reputation as a serious tool for serious people, and it found its way onto the wrists of NASA scientist, with the brand's own history crediting three key figure at the agency as wearers. Chief Rocket Scientist Wernher von Braun was reportedly among them. Allegedly, O&W supplied more watches to NASA than any other brand during the era and they were amongst the favorites around the various sites and mission control. So as you can see, the mythos and history of O&W as a reliable watch brand for people doing hard jobs in extreme environment's is well establihsed.
The Advent of the Caribbean 1000:
Now, the watch that actually brings us here. By the mid-1960s, recreational and commercial diving was exploding, and depth rating had become the metric that mattered. Three hundred metres was the bar everyone was reaching for, Rolex and Omega alike. 300 meters was regarded as a genuine engineering accomplishment for the era. Then a small, family-run casemaker in the Swiss Jura called Jenny Watches came up with something nobody else had: a monobloc case, machined from a single block of stainless steel with no separate screw-down back. No back meant no back gasket, which meant you eliminated one of the two weakest points in any dive watch. The other being the crown, which Jenny and O&W also tackled (more on that shortly). Jenny trademarked the concept “Caribbean 1000,” and went looking for a partner who could actually bring it to market. O&W, already eight years old at the time but already building a name in rugged, reliable diving instruments through its existing relationship with Jenny, said yes. The result, released in 1964 as the Ollech & Wajs Precision Caribbean 1000, was certified to 1,000 metres. Not 300. Not 600. A thousand. That’s 700 metres deeper than Rolex or Omega had achieved at the time, from a brand most people had never heard of, using a case design from a casemaker most people still haven’t heard of.
Collectors today usually call it the “Jenny Caribbean,” which tells you something about how the credit got split, but the partnership is the whole story. O&W brought the distribution and the military/diving customer base; Jenny brought the engineering. Neither one gets there alone. The Caribbean 1000 wasn’t a press-release watch, either. It went under Arctic ice with ocean explorers. O&W served as official timing partner for an Italian Arctic dive expedition in 1966. It ended up on the wrists of commercial saturation divers, the guys getting paid to work at depths recreational divers wouldn’t dream of, and on military divers who needed something that could survive a deployment, not just a dive trip.
Because the universe has a sense of humor, the Caribbean 1000 also ended up on television: during the first season of the British series The Professionals, both lead actors (Bodie and Doyle for anyone who watched UK telly in the 70s) appear to be wearing Caribbean 1000s. Nobody put it there for product placement money. It was just a watch that field-tested operators of the era actually wore, on-screen and off. Adding to the C-1000’s dive heritage, Alberto Novelli (Italian dental surgeon turned free diving record holder) began to work with O&W in 1963 to help develop the C-1000 line. He would wear one for many years and many underwater adventures.
During the Quartz Crisis of the 1970s, O&W continued to operate and never closed their doors. There are archival invoices from the brand all through to the end of the 1980s. In 1978, when Breitling was struggling, Willy Breitling (a friend of Albert Wajs and Helmut Sinn) invited them to buy machinery and whatever IPs they wanted. Albert bought the Navichron name which would help O&W survive through the 1980s by selling aviation watches, often under the sub-brands AVIATION and INGENIEUR. There were a few new designs that came from this era that were GMTs and had an ORFINA style to them (think Porsche Design) but they are rare to come by. In the 1990s, new models were introduced. Joseph Ollech passed away in 2000. Albert Wajs kept building under the O&W name and the brand’s M-Series (including the Mirage chronograph line) kept the reputation alive: rugged, affordable, professional-grade.
Here’s the part of the story I actually find more interesting than the 1960s glory years, because it’s rarer: in 2017, after more than sixty years running the company, Wajs who was aging, and by several accounts dealing with failing eyesight, decided it was time to hand the brand over. He didn’t sell to a private equity shop or a holding company looking to slap a heritage name on a generic case. He sold to Charles Le Menestrel, who had been O&W’s distributor for the French market and a longtime collector of the brand in his own right. This wasn’t an outsider buying a dead trademark to flip. This was someone who’d lived inside the brand’s world for years, buying it from the man who built it, specifically to keep it alive and keep it honest. Le Menestrel has spent the years since rebuilding O&W’s production with modern movements, modern case-making, the same Swiss Jura supply chain the brand always used all while keeping one foot planted firmly in the archive. The 2019 reintroduction of the C-1000 in modern form, and the 60th-anniversary C-1000 A that followed in 2024 with genuine new-old-stock ETA 2824-2 movements pulled from O&W’s own remaining vintage stock, were both Le Menestrel’s doing. That’s not a marketing department dusting off a name. That’s a steward.
ASSEMBLY:
There is something that I found particularly fascinating, so much that it needs its own section in this article. O&W has been using the same Swiss-based Saner assembly shop to put their watches together since the 1970s. They are now on their 3rd generation of O&W assembly and there is no end in sight. That is a level of devotion and loyalty virtually unseen anywhere else across any industry.
SPECS AT A GLANCE — O&W C-1000 MKII (CURRENT PRODUCTION):
Case diameter 39.5 mm (39.56 mm)
Lug-to-lug ~49 mm
Thickness 15.8 mm
Case material 316L stainless steel, brushed, Swiss Jura (Haute-Sorne)
Bezel 60-min unidirectional, stainless steel, mineral insert
Crystal Domed sapphire, anti-reflective treatment
Movement Soprod Newton Precision P092, automatic, 4 Hz, 23 jewels, 44h power
reserve; COSC optional
Water resistance 1,000 m / 100 ATM, quadruple-gasket crown, reinforced caseback
Strap/bracelet S-type Mark II steel bracelet, rubber Expedition, or Freediver nylon
(included)
Lume Pale green cream Super-LumiNova, hands and indices
Warranty 3 years standard / 4 years M&P Discount
UNBOXING & INITIAL IMPRESSIONS:
Having had the joy of unboxing the C-1000 myself, it’s worth noting what the brand actually ships, because it tells you who they think their customer is. Every C-1000 MkII comes with the “Freediver” nylon strap included as a complimentary extra no matter which primary bracelet or strap you choose—a one-piece, RAF-style nylon band with a single static line woven through the centre, a direct nod to the line freedivers use to guide their descent and ascent in open water. That’s not a throwaway accessory; it’s a deliberate piece of storytelling, and it’s the kind of detail that tells you the person who designed the packaging actually understands the kind of detail that tells you the person who designed the packaging actually understands the sport, not just the watch. The packaging itself is what I’d call “efficient with a touch of flair.” The packaging consists of a small cardboard box decorated with airmail stamps and Swiss emblazoning. I feel like this is a nod back to the mail-in style of delivery that made O&W so popular. Inside of the box is a black pull-string bag which feels thick and premium. For my Canadians, this makes me think of the old purple Crown Royal bags that all our grandparents used to have on hand to store jewelry and loose change in. It’s a cool thing to have and it can be functional as well. Inside the bag is a tidy, small black cardboard box with everything you need and nothing you don’t. What is really cool is that the watch itself is contained in a small handmade Italian leather travel case. So once again, you get that added functionality from the packaging. Nothing sloppy or superfluous—just packaging that does a good job of complementing the premium, purpose-built tool watch found therein.
The rubber “Expedition” strap option goes even further down that road. Embossed with a centimetre/inch ruler and a 1:25,000 cartographic scale on the front, and a Morse code alphabet and metric/imperial conversion table on the back. Made by an Italian rubber specialist with four decades in strap development, hand-finished in Switzerland. It’s a strap built to function as a piece of survival kit if you actually needed it to. I respect that. It’s the same instinct Marathon and Sinn lean on with their tool-first straps, and it’s nice to see a brand this size sweating those details instead of just shipping a generic rubber band and calling it a day. The beads-of-rice option that I got for this model has its own unique spin to it, with the individual beads all coming to a point rather than being rounded out and smooth like you'd see on a similar style bracelet from other dive brands. It’s a unique touch that you'd be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. The clasp is a nice push-button deployant that also has a twin-trigger micro-adjust release. It’s the same style clasp you find on a lot of watches, but it gets the job done and it looks great. I do have one gripe about the bracelet, but we can address that later.
BEZEL, CASE & CRYSTAL:
The bezel is a 60-minute unidirectional with a mineral crystal insert—a deliberate, modern choice over the original’s 12-hour scale, and the right one for a watch most people will actually use for dive-time tracking rather than GMT-style dual-time reading. Some original vintage models are seen with dive inserts but I can’t speak with any veracity as to the originality of those watches or rarity. The bezel has zero back play and each click feels great and lands right where it is supposed to. The bezel from a stylistic/ design side of things is both beautiful and unique to the DNA of O&W while also being designed in a way that protects the bezel insert from damage and dings. It’s a very smart design and it looks great. What more can you ask for?
Where the C-1000 earns its reputation is the case. This thing is not trying to be thin, and it’s not trying to disappear on your wrist. At 15.8 mm thick it’s a genuinely chunky watch, and there’s no getting around that with a 1,000-metre rating. What I respect is that O&W didn’t pretend otherwise. They built a tool for a job and let the dimensions fall out of the engineering instead of compromising the water resistance to chase a slimmer case. Reviewers who have had it on wrist (including me) consistently note that despite the bulk, it wears smaller and more comfortably than the numbers suggest. The case shape and the relatively short, controlled lug-to-lug (around 49 mm) keep it from feeling like a dinner plate. That’s the same trick Doxa pulls off with the 300T, and it’s a trick that only works if the casemaker actually understands wrist ergonomics instead of just chasing a spec sheet.
The crystal is where I have to be honest with you, because I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn’t point it out. After spending a couple of months with the watch and wearing it at work on patrol, at home doing yard work and dad life, I can say that it's a mixed bag. It looks insanely cool. It gives the watch a very special look and nods back to the vintage super plexis from back in the day. But it takes a beating. The watch seems to find every door frame, door knob, counter or protruding object in sight. I’m not a clumsy guy and I do use my watches hard. This one is a ding magnet. That being said, that's not a detractor from the watch itself, just my lived experience with it thus far. The crystal is 5mm thick, nearly indestructible and there are stories of customers literally falling off cliffs and the crystal remaining intact on the C-1000. Suppliers have stacks of replacement crystals sitting on shelves that never end up being used. So the performance is there.
Further to the crystal, from a photography and content creation angle, it is insanely hard to take a clear photo of the watch. There is a real, noticeable glare off that thick domed sapphire. The AR coating is there, but on a crystal shaped this aggressively, it doesn’t do nearly as much work as you’d want. Ultimately, it's been fine in day-to-day use and I don't think it’s something that needs to be a real ownership consideration. As someone who hates external AR coatings on watches, I’d rather have a little glare than deal with all the scratches and damage that this crystal would have likely already accumulated by now if it did have an exterior coating.
DIAL & HANDS:
Legibility first, always, and the C-1000 MkII does the basics right. The matte black dial uses applied, brushed metal hour markers against high contrast, and the date window sits at 6 o’clock rather than 3, which keeps the whole face symmetrical. I’m generally a no-date guy by preference these days, and I’ll always say so, but I’ll give O&W credit here: putting the date at 6 instead of jamming it in at 3 and breaking the symmetry is the right call if you’re going to have a date wheel at all. It’s a small thing that a lot of brands still get wrong.
The lume is pale green and cream Super-LumiNova across the hands and triangular indices, and the current MkII generation specifically upgraded this from earlier production, brighter compound on the markers, a white date wheel instead of black for better legibility, cream finishing on the 12, 3, and 9 markers. That’s a brand listening to feedback and actually improving the dial generation over generation, which is exactly what you want to see instead of a company resting on a heritage name. The application quality by every account is clean and consistent, which on a watch at this price point is the bare minimum you should expect and not always what you get. The lume glow is bright and strong but I find it tends to glow a bit dimmer. The glow does last longer however. Similar to how Sinn does their lume. Longer functionality vs the short lived wow factor of brighter lumes like BGW9.
MOVEMENT:
This is the part of the C-1000 story that actually surprised me the most, because most brands at this price point would have just dropped in a Sellita SW200 and called it a day, and nobody would have blinked. Instead, the current MkII runs O&W’s own Soprod Newton Precision P092. Built on the Soprod Newton base, modified to O&W’s specs and regulated in five positions. It runs at a standard 4 Hz with a 44-hour power reserve, which isn’t going to win any power-reserve arms races but is perfectly serviceable for a watch you're wearing on the regular. What I actually care about is the testing: the P092 is independently certified by the Laboratoire Dubois in La Chaux-de-Fonds under the Chronofiable standard. A durability and reliability certification that is a different animal from COSC and, by most horological accounts, more demanding in terms of real-world abuse testing rather than pure timekeeping accuracy. O&W also offers a COSC-certified version of the same movement as a paid upgrade.
There is no exhibition caseback to admire the custom OW-branded rotor through, but the engraving on the nickel-plated base (“OW Zurich 1956”) and the co-designed rotor are a nice piece of brand storytelling even if you never see it, because they’ll be there for the watchmaker who eventually services it decades from now. This in my opinion shows a true dedication to watch making and one's craft. Even taking time to care about the details that most people will never come to see or truly appreciate.
WEARING EXPERIENCE & FIELD NOTES:
So what’s my experience and thoughts on the watch? I've alluded to several things throughout this article. However, now is the opportunity to be more thorough in my analysis. In my time wearing the watch on the wrist, I can say there are a few things of note that consistently came up for me. The C-1000 wears smaller than the spec sheet threatens, the bezel and crown operation feel deliberate rather than fussy even with the quadruple-gasket crown assembly, and the case withstands the kind of careless, day-to-day knocking-around that a genuine tool watch needs to survive without complaint.
One of the things that grabs me the most about O&W is the M&P Discount. In our podcast episode with Charles, he spoke about his appreciation for those who work in those fields and the respect that he has for the legacy of O&W that is attributed to the military. O&W extends a standing discount and an extra year of warranty, on top of the standard three, to military personnel, law enforcement, first responders, search and rescue, and humanitarian aid workers. Not a one-time promotional code. A standing program, built into how the company operates. A discount program built on genuine historical continuity instead of a marketing afterthought is no small feat, and it’s exactly the kind of detail that earns a brand real trust from the end user it claims to serve.
One feature that often gets overlooked but I found to be another testament to the care and quality offered by O&W was the offering of two sets of lug holes. One which is drilled through for easy taking off the bracelet and a second set that is closer to the side wall of the case which allows for a smaller gap when putting the watch on a strap. This is a totally unnecessary feature to add but a nice one and once again speaks to the quality and care that O&W has for the finished product and finer details that an end user may never even come to use or see.
QC / HONEST GRIPES:
I like to always preface this part of my articles with a small caveat. Most, if not all, of my gripes (or those of most others in the watch space) are subjective. They stem from a combination of experience and preference, and in my opinion, serve more as an “in case you didn’t know” type of deal. At the end of the day, it's a great watch from a great brand run by great people and you should not hesitate to buy one. With that aside, here we go.
The crystal. I already touched on this. You get the point. It’s great and looks super cool. The glare is just an annoyance. Especially when trying to take photos, and I suspect it is also a pain when checking the time quickly underwater. The AR coating is present and it’s doing something, just not enough to fully tame a crystal shaped aggressively. I want to be fair here: this is a function of the dome, which is itself a function of the water-resistance engineering; it should be specifically noted it’s not an O&W-specific issue. Panerais with similarly domed crystals catch the same criticism. It’s a trade-off, not a defect. But it’s a real one, and if you’re buying this watch expecting zero-glare legibility in direct sun, set that expectation correctly before you order.
The bracelet. As touched on before, the beads-of-rice bracelet offered on the C-1000 is unique to the brand and is steeped in the brand's history. It has a terrific taper and high-quality construction and buckle. It has all the modern construction to ensure that things like bracelet stretch remain a thing of the past. It feels modern and capable with just the right amount of vintage charm and jangle to make you reflect on the heritage of the watch. One of the things of note is that O&W opted to use pins for the bracelet instead of screws. In discussions with Charles, the owner, he informed me that this is an intentional choice based on customer and vendor feedback. Screws tend to be too tight and break or too loose and fall out. On a purpose-built tool watch, you want something that isn’t going to fail under extreme conditions. So pins make sense. I appreciate the sentiment. Screws are just a preference for me, but I understand what O&W is trying to achieve.
The other thing about the bracelet was that I found it difficult to get the right sizing for it. I found that the watch was either too loose and top-heavy and would flop around on the wrist or it was too tight and uncomfortable, especially in the humidity and heat of summer. I would end up having to use the diver’s extension to get it to that sweet spot that feels just right. It would be nice if O&W would develop or include a half link of some kind like Doxa does for their beads of rice, but again, this and my other complaints are subjective issues.
VERDICT & VALUE PROPOSITION:
Here is where I land: the OW C-1000 MkII is, dollar for dollar, one of the more interesting deep divers you can buy today, and it’s interesting precisely because the story behind it is real instead of manufactured. This isn’t a brand cosplaying as a heritage tool-watch maker. Ollech & Wajs actually built the first certified 1,000-metre dive watch in 1964, actually outpaced Rolex and Omega doing it, actually had American GIs buying its watches out of pocket in Vietnam because the issued gear wasn’t good enough, and actually got handed down, not sold off to a holding company, handed down from its founder to a steward who’s spent years rebuilding it the right way.
At roughly $2,500 USD, you’re up against serious competition: the Tudor Pelagos at a higher price point with a higher-spec in-house movement and a titanium case option, the Doxa 300T Professional in a similar conceptual lane with arguably better brand recognition, and a wave of well-regarded microbrand divers running Sellita movements at lower price points. The C-1000 doesn’t win on brand recognition (something I hope to see change) but almost nobody outside this hobby has heard of Ollech & Wajs. But wins big time on is authenticity of story and a genuinely uncommon, brand-exclusive movement that most competitors at this price point simply don't bother building. You’re not paying for a name people will recognize at a dinner party. You’re paying for a watch that did something genuinely first, from a company that’s never stopped being able to prove it.
So who is this watch for? It’s for the diver or collector who already owns a Submariner-shaped watch and wants something with actual depth-record pedigree instead of just depth-record aesthetics. It’s for the guy who reads brand histories for fun and wants a watch that rewards that curiosity instead of being just another homage with a story bolted on after the fact. And it’s for military, law enforcement, and first-responder buyers specifically, because O&W has built an actual standing relationship with that community, not a marketing campaign aimed at that community, an actual relationship, going back sixty years and reflected in a real discount program today.
Is it a true GADA watch? Not quite, and I don't think it’s trying to be. O&W has the M52 AU for that. At 15.8 mm thick, the C-1000 isn’t slipping under a dress shirt cuff at dinner without you knowing it’s there. This is a purpose-built deep-diving instrument first, everything else second, and it executes that one job about as well as anything in its price bracket. If you need a one-watch collection, look elsewhere. If you want the watch that actually beat the giants to the bottom of the ocean sixty years before anyone else, and is still being built today by people who care enough to keep proving it, this is genuinely hard to beat.
-Rico
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