Ons Jabeur made Arab sporting history on center court. Nuncier has spent its existence trying to put Arabian watchmaking on the global stage. Their collaboration is less a celebrity endorsement than two parallel ambitions finally meeting.

The collaboration started with a gift to Ons Jabeur, when she was gifted a Nuncier Watch. Nuncier is an Arab-born brand building contemporary design around a distinct Arabian identity. What drew her in, according to brand manager Haroon Naeem, was the shared identity and the opportunity to collaborate together. Naeem explains “She was looking for more than an endorsement. She wanted to create something that expressed who she is beyond tennis.”

That instinct, to be seen as more than an athlete, and specifically as an Arab woman with a story that predates her tennis, is at the heart of this collaboration, in designing the Ons Jabeur x Nuncier Watch.

Jabeur’s place in tennis history is not incidental to this story; it’s the reason the partnership carries substance. A former World No. 2 and three-time Grand Slam finalist, she became the first Arab and African woman to reach a Grand Slam singles final. Her achievements have made her, almost immediately, a symbol larger than her sport across the Arab world.

Nuncier Watches is not a startup borrowing a famous name. By the company’s own account, it has customers in 115 countries, with roughly 60% of sales coming from international markets and 40% from the GCC. Its strongest territories are the United States, the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Kingdom. Its wider portfolio sits on Farfetch, Ounass and Saks Fifth Avenue and other retailers..

Nuncier has built a global watch brand out of the Gulf, at a moment when Arabian design has rarely been allowed to mean “contemporary” and “distinctive” in the same sentence, rather than defaulting to ornamental shorthand. Naeem frames it directly: Nuncier’s ambition is “to put Arabian watchmaking on the global stage through products that are contemporary and distinctive, while remaining firmly connected to where we come from.”

Put those two ambitions side by side, and the collaboration reads less like a sponsorship and more like a meeting of people solving the same problem from opposite ends, one on a tennis court, one on a design bench.

A Deliberate Departure From The Category

Elsewhere in horology, athlete collaborations tend to lean into the sport, not away from it. Rafael Nadal’s decade-long partnership with Richard Mille has produced watches whose design details come directly from tennis, the RM 27-04 Tourbillon’s construction was inspired by the process of stringing a racket, and the RM 27-03’s red-and-orange dial pays homage to Nadal’s Spanish flag. Novak Djokovic’s Hublot Big Bang Tourbillon “GOAT” Edition goes further still: its case is built from a composite incorporating Lacoste polo shirts and Head tennis racquets, the caseback is machined to resemble racquet strings, and the bezel screws are shaped like tennis balls. Even the edition sizes are tennis-literal, production runs matched exactly to Djokovic’s win totals on each court surface.

Jabeur’s brief did the opposite. From the outset, she asked Nuncier to build a watch that reflected her, not her sport, and the resulting design carries no racquet motifs, no court-surface color coding, no scoreboard references of any kind. In a category where the sport is usually the design brief, that’s not a minor styling choice. It’s a departure from how athlete watch collaborations are typically built, and it puts the collaboration closer in spirit to Serena Williams’s partnership with Audemars Piguet, built around her as a cultural figure rather than her record on court, than to the tennis-as-hardware approach that defines most of the field.

From the outset, Jabeur set a condition that shaped everything Nuncier built: the watch should not be defined by references to tennis. She wanted the design to reflect the person beyond the athlete. What she gave the design team instead was a philosophy of time, developed over the course of the collaboration.

“Time shapes who we become. It tests us, teaches us, and reminds us to trust our journey. Happiness comes when we stop fighting time and start living within it. At our own pace. With intention. With balance.” Ons Jabeur

That became the brief. As the design took shape, she distilled it further, “Time moves quietly. It teaches us when to pause, when to breathe, when to feel. Happiness isn’t something we chase, it’s something we allow. In the moments we slow down, we remember what truly matters. Time, lived with heart, becomes joy.”

The result is a sand-textured dial finished with raised Arabic markers and matte sandblasted hands, a deliberate use of Arabic script as a design language rather than a decorative flourish, set in Nuncier’s signature Carbon X Tech case with integrated anti-shock ears. Quick-release Nanotech Dirt Resist rubber straps in beige and green complete it, colors Naeem attributes to Jabeur directly, chosen for the warmth and playfulness they bring against the sand-toned dial. Everything about the watch speaks to Jabeur’s and Nuncier’s heritage and authenticity.

What the collaboration is actually selling

Naeem is explicit about what the partnership represents for Nuncier, and it isn’t really product sales. “Ons represents ambition, authenticity and pride across the region,” he says. “This collaboration gave us the opportunity to look beyond everything she has achieved in tennis and create a watch that reflects her story, her personality and the way she sees time.”

That’s a brand talking about regional pride, not units moved, and it fits a pattern. Nuncier has built recognition through sport broadly, sponsoring Victory Team in international powerboat racing, the 2026 Bahrain Tennis Open Challenger (returning in 2027), the Bahrain Olympic Team, Manama’s FIBA 3x3 World Tour stop, and the FIP Juniors Asian Padel Championship. But those are sponsorships, logo placements at events. Jabeur is the first time the brand has built a product around one person’s story, rather than attaching itself to an event.

The distinction matters for what “Arab representation” means here. This isn’t a brand renting a famous face; it’s two entities whose public identities are already built on the same claim that something contemporary, ambitious and world-class can also be unmistakably Arab.

Centuries before Swiss ateliers existed, it was Islamic astronomers and engineers, men like Al-Jazari, whose programmable water clocks are considered among the earliest machines of their kind, who pushed timekeeping from observation into precision. A watch built by an Arab brand, shaped by an Arab athlete’s own philosophy of time, isn’t borrowing prestige from that history. It’s returning to it.