Say hello to the Christopher Ward C1 Worldglow

Christopher Ward hosts a couple of sale events a year. It's primarily to clear stock for new releases, or to sell off their "nearly new" products that have been purchased and then returned. The discounts are usually around 30%.

The most recent of these sales was earlier this month and I had a couple of watches in mind, primarily the C63 Sealander GMT with the "hunter green" dial. I've been planning to buy that watch for some time, but was holding out for the new logo on the dial before doing so. However, if one came up in the sale, I figured i'd probably go for it.

As I'm an hour ahead of the UK, the sale was due to go live just as I cycle home from work, but I decided that this would go some way to stop me going overboard with sale purchases.

The sale items are often single items, it's rare that there's multiple items of the same product, which means the purchasing process becomes a game of fastest fingers win. Thus, sale day can turn into a bit of a frenzy, and it's very easy to miss out.

I cycled home as planned and looked at the sale page. The options available were already considerably reduced, and there was no hunter green C63 GMT. What there was, however, was this - the C1 Worldglow.

The watch was only sold for a short time in 2021, coming from the C1 line of "dress" watches, and following the C1 Moonglow, a full lume moonphase complication watch. I'm going to ask CW how many were actually sold, because I don't believe it was that many. I wouldn't say it was rare, but certainly not common.

The movement is known as the JJ03 which is an in-house worldtimer module added onto the Sellita SW330 (I believe it's the -1 variant). This was designed by Johannes Jahnke, previously the design director at Sellita. The movement is finished with a black rotor bearing the Christopher Ward text and twin flags logo, and can be seen through an exhibition caseback.

The watch is 43.5mm, with a lug to lug of about 50mm, but that milanese bracelet hangs straight down and as such, the watch fits my 18cm (7") wrist perfectly. I'd say it wears slightly smaller than my Longines Zulu time which is 42mm and about the same lug to lug.

Onto the dial then, the 24 cities are positioned around the outside of the dial, and whilst the text is small, it's perfectly readable at the distance your wrist would normally be. Inside that, we have the rotating 24 hour disc that enables you to read the time in each zone, then we get to the main event, which is the inner dial that shows the Christopher Ward name at 12, and with the lower three quarters having the top-down look at the world map. The best bit, is that the whole map, plus the hour and minute hand are full lume, and boy do they light up!

So there we have it, my first Christopher Ward, my first worldtimer and my first Milanese bracelet. I'm looking forward to taking this on some travels!