Description
Oris has added a burgundy dial to its ongoing collaboration with Cervo Volante, the Swiss company that turns culled Alpine deer hide into leather. The new Big Crown Pointer Date arrives in a 40mm steel case on a brown deer-leather strap, priced at CHF 2,250 / USD 2,600, and — unlike most Oris collaborations — it is not a limited edition.
The colour is the seasonal hook. Oris's factory sits in Hölstein, in Switzerland's Waldenburg Valley, and the burgundy is pitched as an echo of the valley's autumn foliage. That is marketing, but it is marketing with an unusually literal supply chain behind it: the strap leather comes from deer in those same Swiss forests, taken under managed population control, with the hides processed rather than discarded.
What you get is the most recognisable watch Oris makes — the pointer-date Big Crown — in a colour it has not worn before, at a price that sits below the brand's in-house calibre models.
Design
The multi-piece stainless steel case measures 40mm across, 48.2mm lug-to-lug and 12.2mm thick, mixing brushed and polished surfaces, and is topped by a domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment on the inside. The coin-edge fluted bezel and the oversized crown that gives the model its name are both carried over unchanged.
The burgundy dial keeps the Big Crown's full vintage-aviation vocabulary: Arabic numerals around the perimeter, a railway minute track, cathedral hands, and the central pointer-date hand that sweeps a 1-to-31 scale at the dial's edge. Super-LumiNova is applied to the numerals, indices and hands. The screwed steel caseback carries a mineral-glass window onto the automatic calibre. The strap is brown deer hide from Cervo Volante, fitted with Oris's quick-release system, and each watch ships with a matching deer-leather travel pouch.
Specifications
- Model: Oris Big Crown Pointer Date x Cervo Volante, burgundy dial
- Case diameter: 40mm
- Lug-to-lug: 48.2mm
- Case thickness: 12.2mm
- Case material: multi-piece stainless steel, brushed and polished
- Bezel: fluted coin-edge
- Crystal: domed sapphire with anti-reflective coating on the inside
- Caseback: screwed stainless steel with mineral glass display window
- Water resistance: 50m
- Dial: burgundy, Arabic numerals, railway minute track, pointer-date scale, cathedral hands, Super-LumiNova on numerals, indices and hands
- Movement: Oris calibre 754 (based on the Sellita SW 200-1)
- Winding: automatic
- Complications: pointer date
- Frequency: 28,800vph (4Hz)
- Power reserve: 41 hours
- Strap: brown deer hide by Cervo Volante with quick strap-change system; matching deer-leather travel pouch included
- Limited edition: no
- Price: CHF 2,250 / USD 2,600
- Availability: now, via Oris
What's Exciting
The pointer date is the reason this model survives, and it is worth being clear about why. A pointer date needs a dedicated module driving a fourth central hand around a peripheral calendar scale — it is more complicated to build than a window date and markedly harder to read quickly, which is exactly why almost nobody else bothers. Oris has kept it since 1938 and made it the signature of an entire family. On a burgundy dial, where the date hand's tip is the only break in the colour field, it reads better than it does on the black and silver versions.
The Cervo Volante partnership is the part that deserves more credit than it usually gets. Swiss Alpine deer populations are culled annually for forest management, and the hides have historically been waste. Cervo Volante tans them, and Oris has been buying the output since 2021. It is a genuinely circular material story rather than a sustainability claim bolted onto a press release — and at CHF 2,250 for a Sellita-based automatic with a true in-house module, a sapphire crystal and a strap with that provenance, the value case holds up without needing the environmental angle at all.
History
Oris was founded in Hölstein in 1904 and has stayed there, which is unusual enough in modern Swiss watchmaking to be worth noting. The Big Crown dates to 1938, built for pilots who needed to set the time without removing their gloves — hence the oversized crown — and the pointer date arrived on it the same year, making it one of the longest continuously produced calendar displays in the industry.
The model has anchored Oris's catalogue ever since, through the quartz years and the brand's 1980s management buyout, and in recent seasons has carried most of its collaborations: the Lou Gehrig edition, the Hölstein anniversary pieces, and since 2021 the Cervo Volante series. This burgundy reference is the fourth dial colour in that run, and the first tuned explicitly to the valley the company has worked in for 122 years.
