Tissot PRX Lee Dong Wook Special Edition hides a tiny lion on its seconds hand

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Tucked into the middle of a plain white PRX dial, a tiny white lion rides the seconds hand, one thumb raised, circling the watch once a minute. The Tissot PRX Lee Dong Wook Special Edition is otherwise the standard 35 mm quartz PRX, steel case, white lacquer dial, integrated bracelet. That one small passenger is the whole story here, and he is very easy to miss at a glance.

He is Wookdong, Lee Dong Wook’s cartoon alter ego.

The South Korean actor has been a Tissot global ambassador since March 2022, and the edition lands on his November 6 birthday. Wookdong started as his own character, a white lion with pink ears his fans know from his social channels and merchandise, and Tissot built the collaboration around the lion rather than the actor’s face.

Tissot also gave Wookdong a companion for the project, a second character dressed in the brand’s black and red, wearing overalls with a white T on the chest and a striped tail to match, and the pair turns up across the artwork and the packaging.

The lion shows up three times

On the dial, Wookdong sits on the seconds hand, thumb up like a hitchhiker already picked up, easy to miss entirely. Flip the watch over and he is engraved on the caseback beside the words Wook Special Edition.

Open the presentation box and he appears a third time.

The white box carries the pair on its lid, the two Wookdongs holding hands under the Tissot name, and inside, the pink lining matches his ears while the watch sits on the steel bracelet with the rubber strap laid in beside it. Three appearances, none of them loud, and each one rewards the person who bothers to look for it.

The dial itself is white lacquer, with four markers carrying peach-pink accents matched to Wookdong’s ears. A specially developed pink Super-LumiNova covers the hands and markers, so the dial glows pink in the dark.

Applied batons, a date window at 3 o’clock, the PRX wordmark printed low. Standard layout, deliberately plain.

Standard PRX hardware underneath

Everything else is the familiar 35 mm PRX, the smaller case in the line Tissot revived from its 1978 original. The name is the brand’s own shorthand: Precision, Robustness, and a Roman numeral X for the 10 bar water rating. The case is 316L stainless steel with a sapphire crystal and anti-reflective coating, and the whole watch weighs 97 grams on its bracelet.

A Swiss quartz movement, the standard PRX quartz caliber, runs the three hands and the date, with an end-of-life indicator that starts the seconds hand jumping in four-second steps before the 1.55 V battery gives out. Nothing in the running gear changes for the edition.

The movement, the case, the crystal, and the bracelet are standard PRX parts, which keeps the price where it lands and puts every gram of the edition’s character into the dial, the caseback, and the box. At 97 grams, it also wears light for a steel watch on an integrated bracelet.

The case measures 35.0 mm across, 34.6 mm lug to lug, and 9.6 mm thick, with an 11 mm lug width where the bracelet meets it.

Two straps come in the box. The steel bracelet closes with a butterfly clasp, and a white rubber strap with pink stitching rides along as the second option. Both attach with quick-release spring bars, so the swap takes seconds, needs no tools, and changes the watch from dressy to casual faster than the seconds hand completes a lap.

On sale in Japan first, with no US release

Japan gets the watch first, and the rollout is a boutique affair rather than a wide release. An early sale runs November 14 at the Tissot Boutique Ginza and Hankyu Umeda, two stores only. A general sale on November 27 adds the Shinsaibashi, Shinjuku Flags, and Isetan Shinjuku boutiques plus Tissot’s Japan online store.

Seoul got the launch moment: a pop-up at IFC Mall runs November 7 to 16, and Ginza keeps a display up through November 25. Buyers outside those cities are ordering online or waiting.

The Japanese price converts to about $488. Tissot’s UK store lists the edition at about $503, though that page sits at notify-me status with no stock behind it. No US price exists, and Tissot has announced no US release.

Lee Dong Wook helped pick the model and develop the design.

Tissot has run this play before, pairing the PRX with a celebrity name and letting one detail carry the edition. Our look at the Damian Lillard PRX Skeleton covered the same idea at a very different price, a skeletonized automatic with a pocket-watch trick. This edition lands gentler in every direction: quartz instead of automatic, 35 mm instead of 40, a hidden lion instead of an openworked dial, and pink lume instead of a second case.

That restraint is the appeal, and it traces back to the actor’s involvement in the design work. Fans get a watch that looks like a plain white-dial PRX across a room and only gives up its joke up close.

For everyone outside Japan and the UK, the edition is a watch to admire from a distance until Tissot says otherwise. The lion, at least, travels well. He will still be circling that white dial, thumb raised, once a minute, long after the pop-ups close and the displays come down.

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