The Satisfy x Coros GPS Watch Is Just for Runners & That's Why It's Good

There's not much else you can do to modify a watch. Particularly GPS watches, where, with no hands or date windows, it's more about what the device does than what it looks like. To go deeper, Satisfy designed three new watch faces. Physical Overview displays daily distance, heart rate, recovery status, and calories burned; Environmental Conditions shows outside temperature, rainfall, humidity, and UV index; Training Overview has weekly distance total, elevation gain, recovery, and training load. All have a clean, easy-to-read design, and are exclusive to the collab watch (as in, you won't find them in the Coros library).

The watch also comes with three custom training workouts designed by the Norwegian ultrarunner Stian Sommerseth, who Satisfy sponsors.

The collab's launch campaign was shot during a single 19.66-kilomter run on trails in the French Pyrenees, near La Pierre Saint-Martin, with athletes Vaida Nakrosiute and Essaw "Essi" Tesfom. Stretching across the border of France and Spain, the Pyrenees are full of runnable trails and routes—this is where Kílian Jornet grew up—but isn't as well-known as the Alps and other ranges around the world. The pyramidal form of Pic d'Anie is visible in some of the photos, but this isn't a skyline of iconic peaks.

For all the online exposure the Adidas collab got with the Circle Pit, I'd argue that this is the more interesting partnership, specifically because the hype factor is lower. The campaign isn't as cinematic as the Levi's collab or as hardo as the Adidas one, and the watch is the subtlest piece of collab gear Satisfy has worked on. It isn't like a Rolex; you have to be deep in gear nerdery to identify a runner's watch as a Coros or Garmin or Suunto, and even deeper to recognize the model. All this makes this collab cooler—it lives closer to a niche, a core within a core within trail running, farther from the online buzz cycle that so many of these partnerships live and die by.

Because of that, I suspect more runners than clout chasers will pony up to buy this one, and that it'll fly lower under the radar than Satisfy's footwear collabs. Most owners of the Levi's collab probably won't be climbing in those jeans, but nobody buys a $500 GPS watch just to wear it around, because the color is nice; you buy it to use it. In this runner's opinion, that distinction is what makes this collab good. More collabs should aim for the niche.

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