Bodega x G-SHOCK 35th Anniversary

It’s been thirty-five years since engineer Kikuo Ibe and his project team unveiled the first G-Shock watch. When Ibe and company envisioned the project, the endgame was straightforward enough; create a watch with a ten-year battery life that could withstand a ten-meter drop and ten atmospheres of water pressure. Getting to this endpoint was anything but simple. It took two years and over two hundred prototypes before the DW-5000C model launched, but once it was ready to go, there was no looking back. G-Shock watches quickly established themselves as the go-to utilitarian timepiece, ‘the world’s toughest watch.’

There are countless products, in countless fields that, at one time or another, have broken out some variation on the phrase “world renowned” as a self-description, but there are different levels of world renowned. There are brands that have gone out of their way to establish international reach through extensive marketing, and there are brands that are world renowned by reputation. G-Shock watches are world renowned by reputation.

Used by the likes of Special Forces military personnel, competitive race car drivers, deep-sea divers, firefighters, mountaineers, pilots, surfers and even astronauts, G-Shock watches deliver day in, day out reliability in the kind of physically demanding conditions that in no way constitute the typically prescribed environment for the proper function of traditionally intricate, delicate mechanisms of precise timekeeping.

To people outside of these professions, this represents a major component of G-Shock’s allure. Generally speaking, the notion that “this watch went into space, then withstood re-entry” is a real advertising time saver. It’s a different story for people inside of these professions though. Deep-sea divers are not going to buy a watch simply because it as categorized as “for deep-sea divers,” or because of how many different modes it comes equipped with, if that watch doesn’t actually function underwater. This is why you don’t see infomercials where someone drops a G-Shock out of a Blackhawk helicopter, and a guy on the ground shows that it’s still ticking. All of the features and technology aren’t in place to show off like a new toy, as much as they are there to, essentially, take for granted as you go about your daily business.

G-Shock’s ongoing, 35^th anniversary celebrations, sees the brand pair up with Bodega on a collaborative edition of the iconic DW-6900, that celebrates the kind of exceptional performance that goes on right under the nose of the daily grind. Playing off of the “hidden in plain sight” concept of the Bodega storefront, the G-Shock x Bodega DW-6900BB-1BD features a matte black, resin construction, ‘Bodega’ text co-branding and the hidden in plain sight slogan applied to the watch band.

The hidden motif carries over into the watch’s packaging, as the iconic G-Shock case is given a bodega-centric twist. A stash can disguised as a canned food staple, alphabet soup, drives home the point that true quality is not meant to be an outlier or a sideshow demonstration; it’s meant to be something that you can grab onto, without a second thought, every day. When you have true quality, you don’t need to constantly announce it, because people will specifically seek it out.

The Bodega x G-SHOCK DW-6900 launches Thursday, December 20^th in-store and online.