Introducing the Official Watch of Kermit the Frog

“Let’s face it, [a watch] isn’t really anything anybody needs, right?” VJ Geronimo, Oris’s CEO, told me last week. That’s a brave thing for the executive of a watchmaker to say, but it’s an epiphany that freed Oris up to make the ProPilot X Kermit Edition, a lime-green tribute to The Muppets’ leading man, er, frog. 

The new $4,600 ProPilot X is the crown jewel of Oris’s 2023 collection, which has just been unveiled at this year’s Watches & Wonders. In contrast to the ProPilot sans-X and its large pilot-watch style numerals, the X’s understated dial makes it adaptable to the bright colors tat Oris like to paints the watch with (see: last year’s coral-colored edition). The Kermit-green hue is right at home splashed across the entire dial of the watch. But it doesn’t look like  The Muppets merchandise, either. The brand intentionally kept the overt Kermit references to a minimum, and the green doesn’t look out of place in the Oris line. 

The watch does, however, contain one Easter egg—or maybe it’s a Kermit Day egg.  For 24 hours on the first of every month, Kermit’s cheesing face spins into view inside the date window, located at 6 o’clock. “We could have put a big Kermit the Frog emoji on the dial,” Ken Laurent, Oris’s creative director, said in a press release. “Some might have done that because they want their most important collaborations to be in-your-face, to scream. But we didn’t want that. We wanted something more humble that would respect the product.” (The idea of a dedicated day is fun but, for me, if I’m buying a Kermit watch, I want more Kermit! Just a dollop more would do, honestly.) 

The Kermit ProPilot X is emblematic of Oris’s ethos: watches should be fun. That lightness often seems to get lost in the watch world—look no further than the combative comments sections one finds on Instagram and watch websites for proof of that. Geronimo said the link between Kermit and Oris comes down to a shared goal to “make people smile.” 

Kermit the Frog has actually been making watch collectors smile for decades. This won’t be the first timepiece to carry the name, at least not unofficially. When Rolex released a version of the Submariner with a bright green dial in 2003, collectors christened it the Kermit. The fact that the name was fan-generated is an auspicious sign for Oris: that specific shade of green is so associated with Kermit that the ProPilot X accomplishes a lot with its dial shade alone. As for competing with that collector-favorite, Geronimo isn’t worried about being known as the other Kermit. “No, no, no, no, no,” Geronimo said on the phone, “not worried, not worried about it at all.”