Here’s a story of what happens when an April Fools day joke becomes reality – and why a startup British watchmaker just revealed a new collection with dials inspired by pizza toppings.
To understand how such a watch came to be, we need to wind the hands back to 1 April 2023, when Studio Underd0g published a video featuring Richard Benc and Andrew McUtchen – founders of Studio Underd0g and Time + Tide, respectively – teasing a new watch collection inspired by pizza.
Within a few hours, the Studio Underd0g website had received 20,000 visitors and 800 pizza enthusiasts had expressed interest in purchasing the quirky watch. Fast-forward to the present day, and the Pizza-Party collection is real.
One watch is called the Pepper0ni, with a cheesy dial featuring meat, olives and mushrooms, and the other watch is called Hawaiian, with the iconic (not to mention controversial) toppings of ham and pineapple. Underd0g says of the Hawaiian: “We have no doubt that the Pepper0ni may have ruffled a few feathers in Switzerland by making a mockery of their beloved industry, so why not double down and wind up some Italians too?”.
Priced at £550, both watches surround their dial with a crispy crust – sorry, I mean a beige tachymeter – and both feature a 38.5mm stainless steel case housing a Seagull ST-1901 automatic chronograph movement, visible through the exhibition case back. The watches are both water resistant to 50 metres and they have 50 hours of power reserve.
Finally, and just to make them even more quirky, the watches cannot be bought online. They can’t even be bought from a shop or a boutique. Instead, they are only available to purchase directly from Richard Benc or Andrew McUtchen in person. So they’re hand-delivered, just like a takeaway pizza. No word on whether the watches will be presented on a sheet of greaseproof paper in a cardboard box, but I wouldn’t bet against it!
The Studio Underd0g website has details of where to find the watches through 2024. The first opportunity was in Australia on 19 January (sorry, we’re a bit late to the pizza party on this one), but the next is in Leeds on 8 February, followed by London on 9 March, San Francisco in May, Chicago in July, Geneva in September and New York in October. Further opportunities will take place in Manchester, Oxford, Birmingham, Toronto and Dubai, but the dates for these haven’t yet been announced.
