Citizen's Sustainable Past and Future

Its “Eco-Drive” light-powered watches date all the way back to 1995. Fitted with a solar cell that that feeds off natural or artificial light pouring through the crystal and the dial to power a titanium lithium-ion battery, they have long been billed as “unstoppable” by the Japanese brand. Unstoppable they remain, witness the huge part they continue to play in the Citizen collection, and in its marketing, buttressed by such hard-charging sports stars as American football’s Eli Manning and cricket’s Kevin Pietersen.

However innovative it may have been, “Eco-Drive” only served to cement Citizen’s reputation as a groundbreaker. As its origins suggest – it was founded in 1918 as the distinctly unjazzy Shokosha Watch Research Institute - it has been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. And it boasts a number of technological first from world’s slimmest LCD watch to first voice-recognition watch to first dive watch with electronic depth sensor.

Today it is still pushing the boundaries. The headline feature of its Skyhawk A-T line is “atomic timekeeping with radio-controlled accuracy”, which allows the watches to synchronise with atomic clocks around the world and synchronise automatically with the prevailing time zone.

Citizen, of course, is not just about technology. It is also notable for the quality of its styling, which often comfortably outstrips its very reasonable price range, whether it be dress watches or military/aviator chronographs. Check out the Calibre 8700, for instance, or the distinctive rectangular Largo. And it also has its fair share of cult watches - again, unusual at the price. Take the titanium dive watch BJ8040-01E, it's dubbed the “EcoZilla”.