Studio Underd0g: The Watermel0n Was Never the Joke
The watch dial is one of the most underused surfaces in modern industrial design. For roughly forty years, the answer to the question "what should a serious watch dial look like" has been black, white, occasionally blue, applied indices, a register of restraint that is mostly fog. Studio Underd0g is what happens when a real product designer treats the dial as a canvas and refuses to apologise for it.
The watch establishment doesn't quite know what to do with this. The conventional reaction to a sliced-watermelon dial — from the reviewer who treats colour as compromise, from the forum tier that thinks a Speedmaster homage is the height of design, from the AD floor staff who will not show you anything they wouldn't be seen wearing themselves — is to file it as a novelty. A starter watch. Not a watch for adults. That filing is the tell. The dismissal is the watch establishment defending its own taste against the first brand in a long time that has both the design training and the production discipline to make a serious case for breaking it.
This is a piece on what Studio Underd0g actually is, why it works, what's in the catalogue, and what it costs you to get one.
The founder, briefly
Richard Benc came out of the University of Nottingham with a Product Design Engineering MEng. He wanted to move to London for a design consultancy role, didn't get one, and took the job that was available — character watch design at Zeon Ltd, the UK importer that holds licences for brands like Disney, Star Wars, and, more relevantly, Braun. After nine months drawing Mickey Mouse on watch dials, he moved internally onto the Braun timepiece line and spent the next five-plus years there.
Five years inside Braun teaches a designer two things. The first is Bauhaus — proportion, restraint, the discipline of subtraction, the Dieter Rams lineage half of modern industrial design has been quietly stealing from since the 1960s. The second is exactly which of those rules they want to break. By Benc's own admission, Studio Underd0g is in part a rebellion against the monochrome obligation of that job. He has named his influences in interviews: Virgil Abloh, sneaker culture, streetwear. The brand belongs to a design lineage that watchmaking does not usually talk to, and that is most of why it looks the way it does.
He started sketching what became Studio Underd0g in early 2020. Lockdown gave him the time. The first watches went out via Kickstarter, target hit inside the hour. The debut was a 38.5mm bicompax chronograph called the Watermel0n — pink-to-green gradient dial, seed-shaped indices, Seagull column-wheel inside. It sold out. The Go0fy Panda, Mint Ch0c Chip and Desert Sky followed inside the same 01Series and did the same thing.
Five years on, Studio Underd0g is producing more than 14,000 watches a year. One nine-hour pre-order window in 2024 did just under 6,000 units and cleared roughly $3.5 million in sales. A single Pizza Unique — a one-off chronograph built off the back of an April Fool's prank with Time+Tide that escalated into a year-long collaboration — sold at charity for $17,000. The Christopher Ward collaboration last December produced the Alliance 02, a 44mm British-made pocket watch with the in-house CW-001 COSC-certified manual caliber and a 120-hour reserve. That is a sentence that should be impossible to write about a five-year-old microbrand. It isn't.
Why it actually works
The thing the dismissive read misses is that Studio Underd0g's design discipline shows up most clearly in the things you don't see.
Look at the core line. The Watermel0n could have shipped on a lime-green Tropic with pink stitching. It didn't — it shipped on a plain brown leather strap. The case looks like a 1960s Heuer. The strap looks like a Hamilton's. The typography is classical. Nothing else on the 01Series is trying to share the spotlight with the dial.
Then look at the collaborations. The Pizza watches came in a cardboard pizza box, because in a Time+Tide collab built around a one-joke conceit the packaging is the conceit and the brief is to commit. That distinction — quiet on the core line, full commitment on the collabs — is the discipline. Knowing which mode applies to which release is the part most playful microbrands cannot do. They either stay timid across the whole catalogue or lean into kitsch on everything and end up looking like merchandise. Underd0g threads it.
"It is the smallest details that make something look good," Benc said in a 2024 interview. The sentence works both ways. On the core line, the smallest details stay quiet around a loud dial. On the collabs, the smallest details all commit to the joke. Same designer, two modes, both correct.
The other half of the discipline is the production setup, and we'll get to that. But before the workshop and the column-wheel movement: the design works because Benc trained somewhere serious, learned exactly which rules were doing work and which were doing damage, and applied the answer to the surface where watchmaking had been most reflexively conservative for forty years.
The catalogue
The 01Series is the bicompax chronograph in 38.5mm. Now in its third generation. Seagull ST-1901B inside — hand-wound, column-wheel, swan-neck regulator, 50-hour reserve. Regulated in-house to a stated ±10/+15 seconds a day. The reference points are the Watermel0n, the Go0fy Panda, the Mint Ch0c Chip and the Desert Sky. If you are buying your first Underd0g, this is the watch.
The 02Series is the 37mm field watch. Sellita SW210-1 hand-wound. The dial is a brass base under seven layers of Super-LumiNova, with a sapphire numeral disc suspended one millimetre above the lume — physical depth most field watches at this money cannot touch. Pink Lem0nade, Full Mo0n, Steffany Blue. Under-rated relative to the noise the 01Series makes.
The 03Series is the monopusher chronograph. Sellita SW510M, Elaboré grade, 63-hour reserve, regulated to ±5 seconds a day. The Salm0n is the anchor reference — single-pusher chronograph, salmon-coloured dial, the closest the brand comes to a traditional chronograph.
Then there is the parallel catalogue of collaborations and one-offs: the H. Moser & Cie passion-fruit pair, the Fears piece, the Sartory Billard piece, the Time+Tide Pizza arc (Hawaiian and Pepperoni in 2024, Burnt Pepper0ni and Classic Cheese in 2026), the Wimbledon Strawberries & Cream, the Aubergine for Fratello, the Christopher Ward Alliance 02 pocket watch, and the D0ghouse-exclusive Guava — lime-green fumé dial, pink tachymeter scale, guava-seed hour markers, sold only at the Maidenhead facility. You either buy it from the on-site showroom or build one yourself through the Assembly Experience — a day at the bench with an Underd0g watchmaker, walking out wearing the watch you just put together.
The production model
Until late 2025, Studio Underd0g's watches were assembled at Horologium — a specialist workshop in Reading run by a third party that handled assembly and three-position regulation. Benc bought it. Moved the operation to Maidenhead and renamed it the D0ghouse. From May 2026 the facility is open to visitors as a working assembly site, where you can watch your watch being built or, on the Assembly Experience, build it yourself. Every watch is assembled start to finish by a single pair of hands. The initials of that watchmaker appear on the paperwork.
This is the proof of design seriousness. A novelty brand outsources assembly indefinitely, banks the margin, and quietly ramps production by adding factories abroad. A design studio that takes its work seriously buys the workshop, brings the watchmakers in-house, and opens the doors so anyone can come and watch how the thing is made. Underd0g did the second one. Christopher Ward is in the same town. Bremont is up the road in Henley. Whatever you make of either, the geography is starting to look like the early stages of a British watchmaking cluster, and Underd0g is one of the loudest reasons for that.
The concession
There are reasons not to buy a Studio Underd0g. The dials are not for everyone. The secondary premium on the headline references is real and not coming down quickly. If the watch you want is a quiet, monochrome, do-not-notice-me chronograph in the same money, this is not the brand for you. Buy a Hamilton Intra-Matic and be happy.
But if the watch you want is one designed by a designer — where the dial is treated as the whole brief and everything else on the watch is built to let the dial be the brief — this is the brand. Studio Underd0g is one of the few microbrands currently operating that takes the dial seriously enough to put a sliced watermelon on it and not blink.
I keep looking for them. When I get one, it goes on the site.
Have a great day,
Luca