Feature: 10 of the most underrated watches EVER
Hype watches aren’t the only watches worth buying. Maybe you’re looking for some ideas for a great watch that’s slipped just below the radar, something underrated that you can enjoy. I’ve put a list of ten together for you. Let’s check them out!
Studio Underd0g 02 Series
The hugely popular Studio Underdog Series 01 chronographs—complete with the mouth-watering Watermelon—have recently stood aside to allow room for another Series, unsurprisingly called Series 02. A hand wound Sellita calibre brings the price up to £800, and unlike the Watermelon, the Series 02 doesn’t leap out of the screen and jab you straight in both eyes. And so, understandably, people have been less taken by the second round of Studio Underdogs watches. What they don’t understand is how these watches work in person, because there’s a whole raft of satisfying little details that simply don’t translate to a static image. What’s most familiar is the bright colour palette of the range-topping Pink Lemonade, although it takes on a pastel subtlety compared to the radioactive luminosity of the Watermelon. Where the 37mm watch takes a sharp turn away from the Series 01 is in the full lume dial cooking beneath the surface, which for extra effect has its markers hovering above it on a sheet of clear sapphire. These things just don’t communicate in two static dimensions. Problem is, seeing one in person to prove it is very difficult!
Behrens Perigee
The big question over Chinese watchmaking is so broad that I don’t think anyone stopped to wonder what they can do if they went full send, and to answer that unasked question is the Behrens Perigee. It has the looks of a sideshow oddity, yes, but if you can see past the strange lugs and bulging crystal, beneath it all is a masterclass of watchmaking that grossly outperforms the £11,500 asking price. There are few watches with a power reserve, and this one has one. Even fewer with retrograde minutes, and this has those as well. Basically no watches have an animated chain complication—aside from the £150,000 Genus—and there are definitely no others that combine that with a 24hr globe complication and an orbiting moon display. Behrens has pulled all of this together completely from scratch, with no Sellita base movement to bring the cost down. It’s a watch that, were it made in Switzerland, would likely have an extra zero on the price. Granted, there aren’t many people who are willing to part with £11,500 for a Chinese watch, but those who’ve made peace with that will be getting a bananas timepiece for a price that’s scarcely believable.
Trilobe Une Folle Journée
The Trilobe Une Folle Journée is not only difficult to pronounce but also underappreciated because in pictures it really fails to pop. In person, it’s a watch that jumps out at you like the girl with the hair from the telly, but instead of being cursed to eternal damnation, you can read the time instead. Which, as it happens, is delivered on three hoops that, rather than sitting still, lazily waiting for their corresponding hand to come to them, loop the loop around the dial to be read at a small red pointer at the bottom. It’s 40.5mm across and about £20,000 deep into your wallet, which, from a front-on perspective at least, seems pretty strong. If you have the advantage of actually having it in person then all that is resolved with a simple tip of the head, because not only does this watch celebrate the curved form in plan, but in profile too, the crystal arching up and over to accommodate the discs as they rise out of the watch in stages. The last one, the seconds, is the best. It seems to be floating.
Maen Manhattan 37
It seems like a big ask to get a high-quality, Swiss Made, integrated watch with a mechanical movement and bracelet for around £600, but that’s exactly what Maen has done with the Manhattan 37. Ignoring the fact the full name makes it sound like you have a stutter, the Maen Manhattan takes the fight straight to Tissot’s mighty PRX and comes away on top—but not many people seem to realise it. I get it, it’s an unknown watch with an odd name that looks like a melting Royal Oak—except, the melted Royal Oak look is actually rather nice. It’s based not on the Royal Oak—at least not directly—but on a lesser known Vacheron Constantin of the 70s, including the striped dial and elongated case. You can choose it with or without a date and—soon—in 39mm as a manually wound watch too.
Louis Erard Guilloché Main II
Proper hand guilloche done with a rose engine is generally one of the most underrated skillsets in watchmaking full stop. Stamped dials get decently close enough that watchmakers have weened us off proper guilloche such that we don’t really remember what it looked like. Our hazy memories go scratching back to wonder how it used to be, and through the fog we come to the conclusion that it wasn’t that much better. But it was. It’s like drinking full fat, cane sugar Coca Cola after getting used to aspartame. We’re frogs in a hot Elma and we didn’t realise that actually good guilloche has become a thing of the past. So not only is it typically rare and expensive, but also not really pushed into cool, new places. That’s where Louis Erard decided to change things around a bit with the 42mm Guilloché Main II, which combines real circular and straight guilloche to form a pattern that feels very zen. Immediately the crisp lines and gleaming furrows blow away the haze and revive the understanding that proper guilloche rules. And for just £3,500.
Kudoke K1
It’s never been a better time for watchmakers and especially watch buyers—so long as you have pockets deep enough to dive in. For everyone else, we’re stuck watching the formally affordable watches we coveted sailing off into the distance on a party boat we never got invited to. The Kudoke K1 is the antidote, a high-quality independent watch that rewrites what’s possible for £8,500. First, the Germanic design isn’t going to get confused for yet another equally priced Rolex Submariner, and in whichever combination of stark colours you choose from, it’ll be crisper than everything I cook in my air fryer. It’s got a feel somewhere between Gothic Lange and old English pocket watch, and that’s on purpose, since Dresden-based Kudoke was home to Hans Moritz von Brühl, who studied under English watchmaker Thomas Mudge. The same inspiration is used for the movement too, which in standard form gets the cock engraved, the balls swirled and everything else frosted, just how I like it. It can actually be finished however you want and even skeletonised, because as a watch made by a proper, independent watchmaker, it can be tailored just for you.
Grand Seiko SBGW231
If you’ve found yourself trawling through endless lists of different crazy timepieces and thought, “I just want a watch,” then this is it. Grand Seiko is best known for its Spring Drive and Snowflake dials, but as well as all that, there’s this, the 37.3mm, £4,150 SBGW231. And it’s just watch. You wind the calibre 9S64 by hand and it will last three days. You look at the dial to read the time and, if you want the date, you’ll have to refer to your phone. And you’ll get the time with no fuss, no nonsense. The way the SBGW231 delivers that simple brief, however, is vastly underappreciated. The ivory dial has a gentle curve like a Milkybar Button. The hands and markers are jewel-like in their faceting, catching even dim light without needing luminous paint. And the calibre, simple as it may be, is a joy to look at every three days when it’s topped back up with wind. It’s traditional watchmaking at its finest—but unexpectedly from a very untraditional Japan.
Audemars Piguet Re Master01
When the Re Master01 emerged from Audemars Piguet back in 2020, it was before a time when the brand was only producing themed editions of the Royal Oak. It was dismissed quite quickly because it’s not without its flaws—but looking back I think it’s one of the most underappreciated watches of recent years. Yes, the naming convention reeks of, “How do you do, fellow kids?” and the movement lacks the romance of a traditional hand wound chronograph with a slab of rose gold getting in the way, and yes, all these complaints were perfectly valid three years ago—but now? The gold dial and two-tone steel and rose gold case make me want to cry out, “Come back! All is forgiven! I’ll never taken a vintage throwback from Audemars Piguet for granted again!” There were 500 of them originally. I wonder if they ever sold?
Chopard L.U.C. Tech Strike One
Half mechanical wristwatch, half first-person shooter, the Chopard L.U.C. Tech Strike One demonstrates exactly why humans are useless. It’s gorgeous, it’s complicated, it’s exquisitely finished and they can be had for less than £20,000 on the secondary market. But no, people would rather spend more on a Daytona. Nevertheless, everyone else’s loss can be the gain of one lucky owner for life—because reselling would be impossible. Okay, so Christopher Ward did sprinkle Chopard’s chips with warm bitterness with the hour strike Bel Canto, but being realistic, this watch’s execution is many leagues higher. Especially in the back, which gets Chopard’s famous calibre 96, revered by all for its sparkling finish and gold micro-rotor. The techy look up front isn’t for everyone, and once you see the awkward Roman numerals there’s definitely no unseeing them, but if the visuals pull through for you there’s simply no better watch for cost to complication and quality out there.
Armin Strom Gravity Equal Force
If you thought the peak of watchmaking was Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, I hope you’re sitting down, because that barely scratches the surface. It’s possible to spend just about a million on a watch that only tells the time. How? Because the very highest end of watchmaking takes a lot of time from very skilled people to create even the finest detail. Why? Because the collectors who buy them have incredibly discerning taste. We’ll come back to that, but before we do, I want you to take a look at this, the Armin Strom Gravity Equal Force. What you’re looking at here is the first rung in the ladder of extreme high-end watchmaking. It’s not just the micro rotor, or the constant force transmission, or the stop-work declutch—it’s the extremely high level of execution that goes into putting it all together. The Gravity Equal Force is considered the stepping stone above brands like Patek Philippe for the next echelon of finishing, with wide, mirror-finished bevels and internal angles of a quality you just don’t see on the mainstream brands. Back to those discerning customers: a collector noticed that the finishing of a small part in the Gravity Equal Force had been changed to a new design that wasn’t as difficult to finish. It was pointed out to Armin Strom and they changed it back. This is hard to wrap your head around, but that makes the £18,000 price of this watch very competitive.
There you have it, ten watches that slip right under that radar deep into underrated territory. What watch do you think deserves more attention?
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