Hands-On: the New BOLDR Odyssey

It isn’t a hot take to say that tool watches tend to be formulaic. Afterall, there are only so many combinations of bezel formats, dial colors and hand styles out there. With new brands borrowing familiar cues and old brands iterating on their own designs, it’s easy to feel underwhelmed by the steady stream of near-identical releases. Oftentimes, I look at a new watch and wish the brand would do something, anything, to put their own spin on even a single component to stand out from the crowd.

Well, BOLDR heard my pleas with the newest iteration of their popular Odyssey diver ($799).  And they didn’t just put their own spin on one component… they spun them all. After I unboxed the sky-blue “Horizon” variant, I spent a solid 10 minutes rolling it around in my hands, taking in all the unexpected details. I noticed the funky gear-shaped crown, the translucent dial that reveals the entire date wheel, the unique dual-stripe hands, a shaped date window, and the seemingly never ending cascading angles that make up the aggressive case shape. Just when I thought I’d taken it all in, I turned the watch over to be surprised by an embossed whale on a display caseback. We will get to all those details (including the whale) soon, but first, let’s cover the basics of this far-from-formulaic GMT.

The Watch

The bold watch with blue accents that kept surprising me is part of BOLDR’s expanded Odyssey collection. Differentiating itself from their more subdued offerings, the Odyssey collection of 300 meter water resistant automatic watches has become a staple for the brand as a playful platform to offer fun, often aggressive looking, dive watches in various materials including bronze and titanium. The four new Miyota 9075 powered models that make up the new line of updated models aren’t the first GMTs in the Odyssey collection, but they are undoubtedly the most brazen with four visually striking ocean-inspired colorways including blue, red, purple and mustard yellow.