Freeport Jewelers has been appointed the official DOXA Watches Authorized Dealer in Curaçao, bringing the Swiss diving brand’s full SUB collection to the island for the first time. DOXA timepieces are now available exclusively at Freeport Jewelers, Handelskade 23, Punda, in the heart of UNESCO-listed Willemstad.
The appointment lands the brand in a market built almost entirely around its own subject matter. Curaçao sits outside the hurricane belt and dives 365 days a year, with more than 70 documented scuba diving and snorkeling sites — among them the MV Superior Producer wreck, Mushroom Forest, Watamula, Tugboat and Black Rock. It is one of the world’s premier scuba diving destinations, where divers routinely plan and manage their own dive profiles.
That makes DOXA’s signature feature more than a heritage detail. Introduced on the SUB 300 in 1967, DOXA’s patented unidirectional bezel carries two scales — an outer depth ring and an inner ring of corresponding no-decompression limits — allowing a diver to read remaining no-stop time at depth without calculation. It was the first wristwatch to integrate a decompression table into the bezel, and it was developed with the cooperation of U.S. Divers, the company chaired by Jacques-Yves Cousteau from 1957 until his death in 1997. Cousteau’s dive teams adopted the watch.
Two years later, the SUB 300T Conquistador became the first commercially available wristwatch fitted with a helium release valve, engineered for saturation divers living in pressurized habitats. DOXA SUBs were subsequently worn by U.S. Navy SEALAB personnel and French Marine Nationale combat divers.
The brand’s most recognizable feature was also a working decision. DOXA selected orange for its “Professional” dial after underwater legibility testing — the first orange dive-watch dial ever produced, and still the most widely imitated. The collection now spans a full palette that includes Sharkhunter black, Searambler silver, Divingstar yellow, Caribbean deep blue, Aquamarine turquoise, Whitepearl white and Sea Emerald green.
“DOXA didn’t decorate itself with diving — it built the tools that made recreational diving safer, and it did that alongside the people who invented the sport,” says Bryan Horne, Founder and Managing Director of Dive Curaçao and Dive Travel Curaçao. “Having that watch sold on Handelskade, on an island where divers plan their own profiles off the shore every single day, makes complete sense.”
Freeport Jewelers will carry the collection in full, from the SUB 200 and SUB 200T through the SUB 250T GMT — reintroduced in 2025 as the first GMT in the SUB line since 2006, and notable for retaining the full no-decompression bezel rather than substituting a 24-hour scale — to the SUB 300, the SUB 300T, the newly launched SUB 300 Ti5 in Grade 5 titanium, and the professional SUB 600T and SUB 750T. DOXA’s special edition will also be represented, the Clive Cussler, an aged stainless-steel watch that looks like it was found in one of the shipwrecks whose names are engraved on the caseback. A percentage of proceeds are donated to NUMA, the private not-for-profit foundation that Cussler founded in 1979, that continues to look for historical shipwrecks in Clive’s honor.
The appointment lands as DOXA brings Grade 5 titanium into the SUB 300’s permanent collection for the first time. The new SUB 300 Ti5 keeps the model’s original 1967 proportions, patented no-decompression bezel and 300m water resistance while cutting case weight by roughly 40 percent, and launches worldwide in five colorways — orange Professional, black Sharkhunter, blue Caribbean, cherry Red Coral and a fully luminous Whitepearl — each fitted to DOXA’s textured Dive Flex rubber strap. Freeport Jewelers will stock the SUB 300 Ti5 alongside the rest of the range from launch.
“Curaçao has earned its reputation as one of the Caribbean’s great diving destinations,” said Mahesh Mukhi of Freeport Jewelers. “Having spent many years diving around the island—including deep, wreck, night and rescue diving—I have a personal appreciation for our waters and coral reefs. That is why DOXA feels so right for Curaçao. It is a serious Swiss dive watch with genuine history and purpose, but it is also distinctive enough to be enjoyed well beyond the water. For Freeport Jewelers, bringing DOXA to the island is a natural fit.”
A long relationship with the ocean
DOXA’s association with the underwater world runs through its history rather than alongside it. Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society adopted the DOXA SUB as the official timekeeper of its expedition team in 2011, and a portion of the profit from the brand’s Clive Cussler editions is directed to NUMA, the non-profit maritime agency founded in 1979 to locate and survey historic shipwrecks. It is a consistent pattern of aligning the brand with people working to understand and protect the ocean rather than simply to photograph it.
That outlook finds a natural audience in Curaçao. The island’s reefs are among the healthiest in the southern Caribbean, and its dive community is unusually conservation-minded: many local operators work to Green Fins environmental standards, and responsible practice — careful buoyancy, no contact with coral, reef-safe sunscreen — forms part of the standard dive briefings here rather than an afterthought.
What the appointment means for Curaçao
For the island’s dive industry, the significance runs well beyond the dive shop counter.
“Curaçao is one of the finest scuba diving destinations in the Caribbean, and it still does not get the recognition it deserves,” said Horne. “We have more than seventy scuba diving and snorkeling sites, reef in genuinely good condition, diving three hundred and sixty-five days a year outside the hurricane belt, and none of the crowding you find elsewhere in the region. You can walk into the water here at sunrise, unguided, and have a world-class reef to yourself.
“When a brand with DOXA’s standing in the diving world chooses to establish itself here, it says something to divers everywhere that no tourism campaign can say on our behalf. It puts Curaçao in the same sentence as the destinations divers already dream about — and that is exactly where Curaçao belongs.”
Availability
DOXA Watches are available in Curaçao exclusively at Freeport Jewelers, Handelskade 23, Punda, Willemstad, with duty-free pricing and full manufacturer 2-year warranty.
Editorial disclosure: Dive Curaçao and Dive Travel Curaçao are proud media and content partners for the DOXA Watches launch in Curaçao, working alongside Freeport Jewelers and DOXA Watches. Model names, specifications, colorways and pricing reflect information supplied by Freeport Jewelers and DOXA at the time of publication and are subject to change; please confirm current availability, pricing and warranty terms directly with Freeport Jewelers before purchase. All images accompanying this release are provided courtesy of DOXA Watches.
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