Garmin Put Snorlax on a £1,000 Watch. Its Long-Suffering Customers Have No Idea Who That Is.

Two years of complaints about childish stock faces. Garmin’s answer: Here’s a Pokémon.

Browse any Garmin forum and the same exasperated post surfaces repeatedly: why isn’t Bug X fixed, and why is there still no standard pro watch face for my £999 Fenix that doesn’t look like it came free with a Happy Meal? Garmin’s answer, delivered on World Sleep Day, 13 March 2026, is a Pokémon collaboration. Two free watch faces — Snorlax & Friends and I Choose You — now live in the Connect IQ Store, with characters that change pose based on Body Battery levels. Technically accomplished for sure. For many of Garmin’s most valuable customers, it is utterly baffling.

“WTF Garmin — why isn’t The Trail Route Navigation Bug Fixed, and why is there still no standard face for my Fenix that looks remotely like a Rolex?” That post, in various forms, has been a fixture of Garmin forums and subreddits for two years. It never gets a satisfying answer. What it has got, apparently, is Snorlax.

Look, none of this is offensive. It’s not embarrassing. It’s just baffling. The distinction matters. A 48-year-old ultramarathon runner who spent £999 ($1,259) on a Fenix 8 does not look at Snorlax and feel insulted. They have absolutely no idea what they are looking at. Their children might. Their children did not buy the watch. Their children do not use the watch.

The Complaint Garmin Has Been Ignoring

When the Fenix 8 launched in August 2024, the official Garmin forum thread on watch faces filled within days. The language was not mild. One owner described the stock faces as “unbelievably ugly” and the selection as “pathetic” for a £1,000 watch. Another objected to the colour treatment: no simple digital face without gradients, too colourful, too bright. A third announced they were returning the watch — not because of GPS accuracy or battery life, but because of how it looked on their wrist.

Other sites like this have formally catalogued the complaints, reaching the obvious conclusion that the problem spanned the entire premium range. The Enduro 3 forum produced its own version: all stock faces sacrifice readability and are very cluttered. The Forerunner 965 forum asked why a watch with a premium OLED display was still shipping faces designed for the older, dimmer MIP screen.

The demand across all these threads was consistent and not unreasonable: clean, elegant, data-rich faces that look appropriate on a £1,000 watch worn in both professional and social contexts. The kind of faces Apple offers as standard. The kind that does not require the owner to explain themselves to a colleague.

The Connect IQ Deflection

Garmin’s unspoken response to watch-face criticism is to point owners to the Connect IQ Store. This has never been a satisfying answer. The store contains thousands of third-party faces. Most are not good. Many charge between $2 and $6 for designs that offer fewer data fields, worse always-on display performance, and higher battery drain than native faces. Garmin’s own forum users described the store as having too many options, most of which are “quite frankly, poor.”

Coros offers no third-party watch faces at all — a position that is worse. Like Apple, Google Pixel treats watch face design as a core product decision and executes it accordingly. Garmin occupies an uncomfortable middle ground: too many faces, not enough quality, and a native selection that its own customers describe as childish.

 

By late 2025, Garmin had begun selling previously bundled stock faces as paid downloads in the Connect IQ Store, while simultaneously blocking free community-built alternatives. The community described it as the beginning of “enshittification” — the gradual conversion of things that used to be free and good into things that cost money and are worse. It is the kind of word that appears when a loyal customer base has started to lose faith.

So Garmin’s Answer Is Pokémon

To be fair — and fairness matters here — the Pokémon Sleep watch faces are free, optional, and technically well-executed. The I Choose You face offers 48 Pokémon options. The Snorlax face recorded more than 10,000 downloads and a 4.7-star rating within 24 hours of launch. There is clearly an audience for this. Yes, even Apple gives away Snoopy watchfaces.

But here is the question Garmin has not answered: when did it last put equivalent creative energy into a watch face for the owner who spent £999 on a Fenix 8 and wants something they are not embarrassed to wear in a meeting? When did Garmin last commission a native face from a premium design studio? When did it treat the aesthetics of its flagship hardware as a design problem worth solving at the same level of intention it has applied to Snorlax’s sleep poses?

The record does not offer a convincing answer.

The Demographic Mismatch Nobody Is Talking About

The Pokémon franchise celebrated its 30th anniversary in February 2026, and the collaboration makes sense in that context. The generation that played the original Game Boy games is now in their 30s. Some of them own Garmin watches. Some of them will love this. Fair enough.

But the premium Garmin buyer — spending £999 to £1,349 on a Fenix 8 or Fenix 8 Pro — skews older. They are, broadly, serious endurance athletes and outdoor professionals in their 40s and 50s. For this buyer, Pokémon is not a nostalgic touchstone. It is something their children were interested in, at some point, on a Nintendo handheld. Snorlax on their wrist does not read as charming. It does not read as anything at all.

That bafflement — not outrage, not embarrassment, just genuine incomprehension — is the real story of this launch.

What Garmin Should Do

The Pokémon collaboration is not the problem. A free, optional, technically accomplished watch face that serves a real audience segment is a reasonable free deal for those who want it. The sleep data integration with the Pokémon Sleep app is genuinely useful for its audience.

The problem is the lack of equal effort for the customer who has been making the same request since August 2024. Premium hardware deserves premium native watch faces — clean, professional, data-rich designs that do not require owners to explain their choices for the wrist in public. Not as Connect IQ afterthoughts. Not as paid downloads of faces beset by problems and other design failures. As first-party design decisions that reflect the price and positioning of the watches they appear on.

Apple understands this. Its watch faces are a design statement. Apple understands this. Google Pixel understands this. Coros does not. Garmin, apparently, does not either.

Garmin makes extraordinary hardware. Its GPS accuracy, training metrics, battery life, and build quality are unmatched for serious athletes. None of that is in question. The question is whether the company believes the face of a £1,000 watch matters as much as its internals.

Sort it out, Garmin. Grow up. Your customers have been asking nicely for long enough.

What do you think – Snoopy or Pokémon next for your Ironman?

 

Last Updated on 14 March 2026 by the5krunner