British watch firm StudioUnderd0g was conceived by Richard Benc during the first year of lock downs in 2020 as a design-led watch brand that promised not to take itself too seriously.
Today, the business is laughing all the way to the bank after selling almost 6,000 watches, online and in-person over the nine hours of British Watchmakers’ Day (BWD), which took place in London at the weekend, the company’s founder has revealed.
Sales were helped by a partnership with Australian media/retail business, Time+Tide, for two pizza-themed watches, which can only be bought and “hand-delivered” at watch shows by either Mr Benc or Time+Tide’s Andrew McUtchen, who is now based in the UK.
The pizza watches launched last year but, because they can only be bought in person, there was a stampede at BWD to the StudioUnderd0g stand where Mr McUtchen was dressed as a pizza chef and selling the tasty red hot timepieces for £550.
Troublingly, the watches sell on eBay for up to three-times their retail value, but the feeling at BWD was that this was an event for watch lovers, not flippers.
Mr Benc likes to do things differently at StudioUnderd0g. His watches are playful and colorful and, unlike the Swiss, he likes to be open and honest about his thoughts and plans for the business.
In an Instagram post following BWD, he shared the news that he had sold 5,930 watches on the day, and even provided a breakdown of the sales by model.
WatchPro shares Mr Benc’s love for a bit of number crunching, so we calculated the implied retail value of selling 5,930 watches, broken down by model.
Series 1 chronograph watches use quartz-based movements and retail for £500. The bestseller was the Watermelon, amounting to one-third of all StudioUnderd0g watches sold on the day, and would have generated revenue of £983,400.
The most popular Series 2 field watch model, which uses a hand-would Sellita movement, is the Pink Lemonade priced at £800.
Accounting for 14% of sales in the recordbreaking day, the single reference would have generated revenue of around £667,000.
If all the watches sold at full price, the business would have generated sales worth over £3.5 million. If the company sold the same number of watches every day for a year it would generate annual turnover of £1.27 billion.
That’s double the annual turnover of Rolex in the UK in 2022.
