This year, Citizen Watch of North America (including the United States and Canadian Citizen Watch teams) jointly celebrated a momentous occasion for the important Japanese watchmaker in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. 2024 marks 35 years since Citizen introduced its outdoorsy family of sports watches known as Promaster. Citizen also recently celebrated its 100th anniversary of making watches.
Citizen Promaster products cover the major bases of adventure watches, including diving, flying, and land exploration. For years, aBlogtoWatch has detailed the many faces of Promaster, which includes casual daily wear vintage-style tool watches as well as high-functionality complex wearable technology gadgets. Promaster watches originated as a way for Citizen to take advantage of an important market for recreational activity watches but evolved into a veritable playground for the brand’s designers. The result is that, while most Citizen Promaster watches are intended for a larger mainstream audience, many of the products have been specifically tailored for the interest of enthusiasts, and have been specifically tested by active-duty explorers and professionals to ensure their utility is never compromised by style or trend. With that said, after 35 years of product releases and evolution, it is hard to globally summarize the entirety of Promaster. What I can say is that Citizen Promaster watches continue to be one of the watch industry’s best products to slap on your wrist and go have an adventure.
That positive emotional sentiment begins with a strong practical foundation. Citizen doesn’t make incompetent products. The proud Japanese company has trained me and generations of watch lovers that the company’s products are thoughtful and thoroughly engineered for their purposes. Even if you don’t like the style or theme of a particular Citizen Promaster watch, chances are you at least trust the watch to reliably work. Citizen has earned a very deserved reputation for enduring quality and practicality, which is a very large reason why many lay consumers have few qualms about purchasing a product from the brand. This core foundation of consumer trust and respect for Citizen watches is crucial to a successful sports watch family like Promaster. Before you win over consumers’ hearts, you must first reassure them that your products will work in the same places where those watches are featured in advertising and marketing. If your watches are featured in the water or in the sky, people must trust that your watches are actually going to function perfectly in those environments. So, to emphasize and remind us about what Promaster watches are all about, Citizen invited aBlogtoWatch to get them cold, wet, and dirty in Alberta, Canada.
Whether you are moving your wrist or spending time in the sun, you are most likely also powering your Promaster watch. The majority of Citizen Promaster products feature Citizen’s long-standing light-powered Eco-Drive quartz movement technology or an automatic-winding mechanical movement. This is an important point because Citizen cares about convenience, as well as sustainability. Not having to change batteries and making sure your watch can work anywhere is a core value proposition of Promaster products. The mechanical products are a bit more expensive due to the complexity of construction, but when it comes down to it, the affordable Eco-Drive-powered Promaster watches are easily some of the best activity watches on the planet (especially for the money).
The history of Citizen is not as a sports watchmaker, per se, but rather as a maker of high-performance yet affordable tool watches for working city-dwellers. Office and city professional watches are what helped make Citizen the important brand it is today, but starting in the 1980s, Citizen was starting to eye the recreational watch market. From today’s vantage point, the existence and logic behind producing sports lifestyle watches make obvious sense. In fact, sports watches easily outsell office or dress watches today, and are the hottest type of enthusiast watch product around. It wasn’t always that way. Special-purpose sports or activity watches in the 1970s and 1980s were often still expensive niche items, and it really took Japanese ingenuity to make sports watches for regular folks.
What is interesting about the emergence of affordable sports watches is that the market suddenly included both people who were doing those sports and people who simply wanted to look like they were doing those sports (or did them occasionally). Prior to this era, few people would own a diver’s watch if they never actually did any diving, especially when such products were still generally expensive and niche. Once Japanese brands like Citizen made diving-style watches available to anyone, it opened up a huge and still fresh aspirational market for people who lived regular lives but wanted an enhancement by wearing an adventure watch on their wrist. The important thing to note is that Citizen was never comfortable simply making a fashionable watch that looked ready for adventure, it needed to actually engineer that watch for the purpose – no matter the intended price point of the item. Accordingly, for many years watch lovers and lay consumers alike trust that Citizen is among those companies whose products are fairly priced and entirely suited to the swimming, flying, climbing, and trekking activities they were touted to be intended for. The value of this relationship between Citizen and consumers cannot be overstated.
Most Citizen Promaster watches today are priced from a few hundred dollars to just over one thousand dollars. Citizen produces more involved enthusiast watches that have higher prices, but none of those will fare any better in the wild than a Promaster. In addition to Eco-Drive technology, many Promaster watches feature Citizen’s Super Titanium case construction or movements with special sensors. Models like the Promaster Altichron and Aqualand have altimeters and depth gauges respectively, while the collection has even included GPS antenna-equipped watches that can determine the accurate time virtually anywhere on the planet.
On a daily basis, I find Super Titanium to be among the most prized features of Promaster and other Citizen products where it may be used. Super Titanium adds strength and far-superior scratch resistance properties to the lightweight and durable features of titanium. Practically speaking, this just means your watches looked newer for much longer. Vastly more expensive titanium watches can start to show scratches and wear in situations that would not leave a blemish on a Citizen Super Titanium watch.
Two of the watches I wear frequently in the pictures are versions of Citizen’s Promaster Fujitsubo mechanical diver. One is the previously reviewed Promaster Fujitsubo NB6025-59H in black DLC-coated Super Titanium. The other is the newer 35th anniversary of Promaster Fujitsubo NB6026-56L, which has a natural titanium case paired with a blue DLC-coated rotating bezel (with black insert) and a matching blue dial. The watch contains an in-house Citizen caliber 9051 4Hz automatic movement and has a 41mm wide Super Titanium case. Don’t miss the micro-adjust expansion system for the bracelet. Both of these watches have a retail price of $1,195 USD.
Getting outside and exploring the great outdoors appears to be a major emotional sentiment that Citizen designs Promaster watches for. For most city dwellers, getting out into nature is not a necessity, but rather a luxury. To go outside and work with your watch is not a punishment but a privilege. More so, there are few outside sports or exploration activities people do where a timepiece isn’t welcome or necessary. Citizen designs its Promaster watches for real divers, pilots, climbers, and any adventurers, but intends to sell them to people who don’t actually need that functionality. What is important to me as a consumer is how seriously Citizen takes the functionality side of its products, and simply lets customers have fun with them no matter what they end up doing or where they take their timepieces.
What also separates Citizen from some of the competition is its cognizance of style. Citizen has always tried to make interesting watches that are fresh but, ultimately, watches the brand believes the market wants. That means Citizen puts a lot of effort into making sure that Promaster and other watches match the dreams, hopes, expectations, and preferences of its consumers. Of course, doing that is as much an art as it is a science, but the constant desire to both be relevant and also maintain high standards is a feature of Citizen’s company culture that you can easily see manifested in most Promaster watches.
The Citizen of 35 years ago would probably easily recognize and admire the Promaster group of watches that exist today. Citizen has created a universe of watches in the more than three decades since Promaster was introduced, but the core mission has not changed, and Promaster watches are still solid tools meant for serious fun. It is hard for me to mention or focus on any one specific Promaster product because that isn’t really the point of the appeal of Promaster. You as a consumer will gravitate towards the style and functionality you like, the point is that Citizen makes respectable choices for most tastes and lifestyles within a product family that consumers trust.
The specific places Citizen took us to test out its latest Promaster watches include areas around Banff and the Bugaboos in the Alberta and British Columbia provinces of Canada. High in the North Rockies, these traditional mountain resort areas are known for their stunning natural beauty, flowing waters, and challenging trails. With millions of people each year coming to play in the natural world of Canada’s pine forests, I can easily say that Citizen chose an ideal territory to experience Promaster. Learn more at the Citizen Watch website.
