In The Dogh0use: Would you pay extra to build your own luxury watch?
Studio Underd0g's new seven-figure facility is a dream come true for wannabe watchmakers.
I live under a number of illusions, but I’ve never thought I’d make a great watchmaker. For starters, my hands are enormous (not a humblebrag, but I can see why some might think otherwise), and I have no patience for minutiae. Honestly, all those tiny components. So fiddly. I have great admiration for watchmakers, but by the end of week one I’d be flush with rage. Or bored.
This is why I almost always resist invitations to have a go at watchmaking. But then when Richard Benc, the elven founder of British watch brand Studio Underd0g, messaged me to say he was opening a new facility just outside London with a space set aside for punters to have a go at watch assembly, and would I like to give it a try, I said yes. Why? Partly home soil, but mostly because Richard is British watchmaking’s Willy Wonka. He even looks a bit like Gene Wilder.
The Studio Underd0g 01SERIES 'Guava' is a distinct, highly-exclusive mechanical chronograph featuring a lime-green textured fumé dial and a pink tachymeter scale.
Benc — rhymes with sense — founded his brand during lockdown and has made a name for it with Instagram-friendly watch drops, few more fêted than those with watermelon or pizza-themed dials. It seems to have gone well. In not much more than five years, Richard has sold more than 30,000 watches. He now drives a Porsche.
For his next trick, he’s taken a ‘seven-figure’ plunge and opened up a facility where he can build watches, doubling down on the ‘Assembled in Great Britain’ tag he adds to his watch dials. It’s in Maidenhead and called the The Dogh0use, a name stencilled on the glass over the plum-coloured front door in the gently ironic sans serif typeface Richard uses to express the brand’s kooky spirit (some of his campaign artwork is very Wes Anderson). He reckons he can assemble between 1,200 and 1,500 watches a month here, an uptick of around 25% on last year.
And it’s to The Dogh0use I’ve been invited. Richard’s team have just finished phase one of the fit-out, and the smell of fresh paint lingers. Catherine Godon of the London-based Letter Studio interiors has taken the Wonka-Anderson brief to heart, creating a speakeasy of sorts where customer presentations will take place. The rich plum tree paint shade continues, and there are wicker John Cullen accent lights on the walls and a deep-pile pink and burnt orange Nordic Knot rug on the floor. The centrepiece is a rather charming bespoke two-seater crush velvet armchair that transforms into an upscale platform for a game of Connect4, played using tokens fashioned from Studio Underd0g watch dials. Despite the autumnal tones, the space is warm and welcoming.
Along the corridor, our little group of four is shown into a small workshop where we’ll assemble the 01Series Guava, a limited-edition 39.5mm version of Studio Underd0g’s signature chronograph with a pink and lime green dial that will only be available at The Dogh0use. It costs £575, but for the more dexterous with an extra £125 to spend, you can go behind the curtain and build it yourself.
Now, someone good at watch assembly will assemble 20 pieces in a day, roughly one every 25 minutes. But Richard’s head of assembly training, former Rolex employee Joshua Sable, has set aside four hours for our quartet to do just one.
At the bench — as watchmaker’s desks are called — we’re presented with a tray of components and lots of Lilliputian tools. Some are obviously screwdrivers or tweezers; others look completely alien. The mechanical movement that will sit at the heart of the watch arrives from China in one piece, and so thank goodness, we won’t be playing with tiny wheels, pinions and hairsprings. The job in hand is to attach the movement to the dial, add the five hands and the crown and its winding stem, and then case it up.
It sounds simple enough. But it’s not. The screw heads are tiny and only visible through a loupe. Some of the hands are barely thicker than an ant’s leg, and slotting them on top of an even smaller pivot is immensely difficult. More than once, my hay-baler hands gripped the tweezers too hard and sent a screw or a hand flying I don’t know where: they’re so small that once they’re gone, there’s no finding them. It’s embarrassing, but also somehow quite funny. Joshua was clearly expecting the maladroitness of his charges, and has pots of spare components ready to gloss over our mistakes.
Four hours later, though, an enormous feeling of satisfaction. In front of me is a working mechanical wristwatch. Even that skinny chronograph central seconds hand is beautifully aligned with the zero marker. A labour of love, that one. Joshua seems pleased. He tests it for accuracy and water-resistance, and signs it off. I made a watch. With these hands. Sort of. Just don’t ask me to do it again.
To book an appointment or an assembly experience at The Dogh0use, visit the Studio's website.
