Carat$24,900 for a rubber Big Bang: Hublot prices texture as a material, not a finish
The Big Bang Original Soft Touch launched on 1 September in All Black and All Red at $24,900, on the in-house HUB1280 column-wheel chronograph built at Nyon.
§1The surface is the selling point.
Hublot introduced the Big Bang Original Soft Touch on 1 September at $24,900. The watch runs the in-house HUB1280 column-wheel chronograph, conceived, developed and assembled at the company's manufacture in Nyon, and comes in two colourways, All Black and All Red. It is the first watch this desk has recorded from the house in which the selling point is neither the movement nor the case metal but the surface of the rubber.
§2Overmoulded, not coated.
The technical claim is specific enough to be checkable, which is more than most launch copy manages. The textured compound is overmoulded, meaning the texture is embedded during manufacture rather than applied afterwards as a coating or a surface treatment, and it runs across case, bezel, dial and strap rather than the strap alone. The company's argument is that this keeps the durability and resistance associated with a rubber component while changing how it feels. A coating wears off a bezel. A material property does not, and that is the whole of the difference being sold here.
§3Two references to its own back catalogue.
Both colourways are references to the company's own back catalogue rather than new ideas. All Black revisits the monochrome concept the house first showed in 2006. All Red draws on the red ceramic it introduced in 2018. Reworking a twenty-year-old concept in a new material is a cheaper proposition than a new case shape and it addresses an existing collector base directly, which is worth noting when reading the price.
§4An export band is not a retail price.
On where $24,900 sits, one comparison needs a caveat before it is useful. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry reported, and this paper carried on 20 August, that July exports of watches with an export price above CHF 3,000 rose 12% by value inside a total up 9.6%.
That threshold is an export price, not a retail one, and a watch retailing at $24,900 sits far above it on either measure, so the comparison is directional only. What it does establish is that the segment this watch is priced into was the growing part of July, not the flat part.
This is a materials story dressed as a launch, and
materials stories are the ones that travel down the trade. If overmoulded texture holds up in wear, the technique reaches lower price points inside two or three seasons, because the process cost sits in tooling rather than in the material itself. For a retailer the near-term question is narrower and it is about the case: a $24,900 rubber watch asks a customer to accept a precious-metal price for a non-precious material, and that argument has to be made at the counter by a person, not by a press release.
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