In 2020, watches became a real escape for a lot of us. Instagram, Facebook groups, even Clubhouse (who remembers that?) were thriving, and for me, watches had become more than a 9-5 as I fell deeper into those communities. It’s where I first came across a guy on Facebook talking about a watch he’d designed that was ‘inspired by a watermelon’. Every time it appeared, the comments filled with feedback as he gauged whether people were actually interested.
They were. And now, six years later, that man, Richard Benc of Studio Underd0g, has just opened the doors to his very own watch assembly workshop here in the UK called ‘The D0ghouse’.
Roughly 45 minutes by train from Central London, the building in Maidenhead is a fusion of creative interior design and legitimate horological assembly, and anyone can experience the process first-hand. For £700, Studio Underd0g will sit you at a watchmaker’s bench and guide you through the assembly of your own watch. What they’re offering isn’t a tour or just a showroom (they have that on-site, too), but a set of tweezers, a loupe, and an opportunity to experience the Underd0g, hands-on.
That alone makes The D0ghouse worth the journey, but having just completed the experience myself, what I didn’t expect was how much it would adjust my understanding of what this six-year-old brand has actually become.
The Unassuming Townhouse
From the outside, The D0ghouse is simply a Victorian townhouse on Park Street, the same address that Benc’s friends and collaborators, Christopher Ward, called home for 12 years before moving down the road. Once through the aubergine coloured front door, though, you’re into a showroom closer to a Wes Anderson meets Willy Wonka spin-off than any traditional space for viewing watches.
The color runs across the walls and ceiling, and a bespoke two-seater sits at the center with a hidden Connect Four, its markers made from rejected 01Series dials.
There’s the ‘Studio Underd0g Cloning Machine’ from the Unoriginals collection, and a piece by Lee Yuen-Rapati (@onehourwatch) depicting the D0ghouse, complete with familiar UK faces: William Massena, Nicholas Bowman Scargill of Fears Watches, and even yours truly (bottom right on the stairs, taking pictures, of course).
Beside the watermelon-inspired basketball stand four statues of hands, Richard tells me these are the team’s handmade attempts at making GPHG awards after they were nominated in 2023 – I’ll leave you to decide which one is the most accurate.
To The Bench
Walking through the hidden door into the rest of the D0ghouse, there’s a room dedicated to the assembly experience, where Assembly Trainer Josh Sable is on hand to guide us through the day. Sable previously spent time at Rolex and Bremont, telling us that on a normal day, he’d assemble around ten watches, and on a good day, that number is closer to twenty. Without spoiling the article for you, three fellow journalists and I had a tough enough time completing one in a few hours. “We didn’t want people simply screwing on a caseback and calling themselves a watchmaker,” Benc tells us. “You do want a bit of struggle. It’s not easy.”
On the bench, we each had a digital microscope, a loupe, a file, precision screwdrivers, tweezers, and a small blue tray of parts that, in theory, should come together to become an 01Series Guava, a new dial colorway you can only get by coming here. The experience involved marrying the movement, dial, hands, crystal, and crown to the case, all while ensuring the accompanying, and frankly hostile, number of tiny screws and clamps were all used.
The build breaks into a few key stages: attaching the dial, securing the movement to the case, applying the hands, trimming and attaching the crown, fitting the crystal and open caseback, before the watch goes away for testing and regulation.
Sable is on hand at every step, first showing us what we’ll be doing, then working between stations to help where needed. Once the dials were on the movements (not before writing a little message on the underside), the movement clamps and their two screws were the first real hurdle. Each frustratingly minuscule, getting the clamps seated the right way round and in the right position, without them vanishing into the mechanical abyss, was hard enough before the screws even entered the picture.
An assembly job at D0ghouse demands a steady hand and the patience of a saint, and it’s not uncommon for assemblers to arrive with no watchmaking background at all, some straight from careers as tattoo artists.
The running-seconds hand was its own particular cruelty, as its pivot was hidden below the dial, meaning you were lowering it blind onto a target you could only hope was there, and aligning the rest demanded a steadiness I did not know I was capable of faking.
What struck me was how the four of us splintered off into our own competencies, each of us surprisingly capable of at least one thing the person beside us found impossible. My moment came when Sable leaned in to check the stem I’d just finished cutting and filing to ensure the gap it left against the case was acceptable: “Absolutely spot on,” he said, taking me straight back to a school classroom, glowing at praise delivered in front of the class (this very rarely happened).
It should be said that a running tally of screws, clamps, and second hands pinged clean out of our tweezers over the morning, launched into every crevice of the freshly painted D0ghouse, never to be seen again.
With the movement cased and the hands finally behaving, the last of the build saw the domed sapphire crystal put into place and the open caseback secured, offering a clear view of the movement I’d just spent a morning (and half an afternoon) wrestling into life. Engraved there, in place of the usual specifications, are three important words: “Assembled By Me.”
From The Living Room To A Seven-Figure Investment
For most of its young life, Studio Underd0g leaned on Horologium, the Maidenhead assembly specialist founded by watchmaker Raphael Pfund. The dependency ran both ways, as Studio Underd0g accounted for roughly 90% of Horologium’s revenue. Benc had spent two years building “assembled in Great Britain” into his brand without any ownership or security in place to deliver it in the long term.
So, in 2024, he took a minority stake in Horologium, buying the remaining stake in December 2025 along with the Park Street building. The result is a capacity the brand never had before: annual production is currently just shy of 15,000, a figure that makes Studio Underd0g one of the largest assemblers of mechanical watches in Britain. Benc recently joined Andy on the Business of Watches podcast, where he discussed the acquisition in detail.
It’s worth highlighting what Studio Underd0g and the D0ghouse don’t do, though. You won’t find anyone here machining bridges or finishing movements. Like most independents, the brand sources its movements from specialist suppliers, including the Chinese manufacturer Seagull and Sellita, for the brand’s take on a field watch, the 02Series. What’s noteworthy is that this assembly isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ marketing line.
The Seagull ST-1901B draws its share of online criticism, but the fault usually isn’t the movement—it’s the assembly. Benc tells us, and I’ve seen first-hand with other watches using the same caliber, that most ST-1901B problems trace back to how they’re assembled and cased.
Studio Underd0g isn’t assembling in Britain simply so it can print ‘assembled in Great Britain’ on the dial. Here, it means something tangibly beneficial, and those benefits will undoubtedly continue as the brand has begun offering a regular stock of its core collection online.
The Underd0g No More
Britain and watchmaking have a long, convoluted relationship. Still, Studio Underd0g, of all brands, the one with the watermelons and the zer0s, has ended up doing something more serious than most of its straighter-faced peers: bringing assembly capacity and training people from scratch, in a country that historically let that skill base wither. And now you can take the hot seat for yourself.
The D0ghouse is now open by appointment. The assembly experience costs £700, which includes the purchase of the 01Series Guava, available exclusively from the D0ghouse. It runs as small-group three-hour sessions with only a handful of benches per sitting, so places are deliberately limited. Those who’d rather leave the watchmaking to the professionals can book a free showroom appointment instead.
Book your slot here today. And no, if you come across a screw on the floor, it wasn’t me.
