Feature: Unimatic Watches

As much as we’d all love to have a £50,000 or even a £5,000 watch, not everyone is so lucky. But that doesn’t mean those with just a few hundred to spend need go without, not at all—in fact, there are many brands a smaller budget can afford to enjoy, and we’re going to be exploring as many as we can. To start, an Italian watchmaker that’s not Panerai: Unimatic.

Let’s get right to it: if you’re paying less money for a watch, there’s less to spend on making it. Bloated marketing budgets aside, paying big bucks for watches affords luxuries like hand finishing, in-house movements, the kind of details that make you look at a watch and say, “Ooh!”. But when you’re paying around £500, the “Oohs” became fewer and further between, and can often disappear completely.

This becomes even more apparent when the company selling those watches doesn’t make very many of them. Think of Seiko—this is an organisation with over a century to its name, with factories that can produce very small parts to very high tolerances in very high numbers, and so you can pay £500 for a Seiko and get a nice, healthy dose of “Ooh”.

When you only make watches in the hundreds and not the hundreds of thousands, however, opportunities to extract the “Ooh” begin to dry up. Making a handful of cases is expensive. Making a handful of dials is also expensive. Making a watch is expensive, let alone a good one. Is it possible for a company to make a good watch, or even an excellent one, in low numbers and be able to reasonably sell it for £500 without taking a big hit right on the nose? That’s the challenge.

And it is a challenge, because it’s not simply a case of doing everything the big boys do but not quite as well—you have to commit to losing some of those aspects entirely. Hand finishing becomes machine finishing becomes no finishing at all. An in-house movement becomes an off-the-shelf movement becomes a plastic quartz movement. No—as a watchmaker tending to low-budget needs, you have to cut some corners.

It’s said that doing things simply is the hardest way to do something full stop. There’s nothing to hide behind, nothing at all, and that leaves the few decisions that are made proud and prominent. It’s easy to make a complicated watch with a big budget—well, it’s not easy, it’s more achievable—using clutter and chaos to bring interest and detail to increase appeal. Simplicity, on the other hand, requires more than budget—it needs a revelation.

And so, we come to the Italian watchmaker Unimatic. All its watches are limited runs, this U2-C amassing just 400 pieces total. It costs less than £450 and even comes with an additional black silicone strap to complement the beige Cordura one it comes fitted with. For a little more, there’s the U1-EMN, stealthy and black, limited to just 200, again with a selection of straps included for the meagre asking price. The question is, can these Unimatic watches get anywhere close to “Ooh”?

Here are some of the ways that Unimatic have been able to save money making watches. The round crown logo, to start, is easy to mill, where an asymmetric one would be trickier. The case is brash, with no complex curves or intricate details—or any details at all, really. The finish is agricultural; don’t even think about any kind of bevelling or polishing here. Even the bezel gets the lightest of treatments, a single step for the U2-C and a single-piece black aluminium insert with luminous pip for the U1-EMN.

The dials, unsurprisingly, continue this industrial theme, using rough textures and thick lines to avoid the pains of precision. It’s less like you’re looking at a watch dial and more like a gauge of some sort, rugged, functional and durable. And the movements? Japanese, from Seiko to be precise, the NH35A. Overall, these watches get to be this cheap by completely avoiding being fine watches altogether—and you’ve got to admit, that seems bad.

But is it? It’s hard to piece this extensive list of roughly executed shortcuts together and think otherwise. But sometimes the sum of the parts doesn’t necessarily equate to the whole, and for Unimatic, that just might be the case. With nothing to hide behind, with only simple shapes and basic finishing to lean on, all that’s left is pure design.

To make these watches work, Unimatic has to work with its shortcomings as elements to be celebrated, making them bold and striking instead of trying to distract from them—and that’s exactly what they’ve done. In fact, there’s a functionality in the designs that is itself appealing, carrying an air of the 60s mega-divers, like the Rolex Deep Sea Special, that were designed just with performance in mind.

What you get is an unashamed sparsity that feels deliberate rather than forced, paring everything back not because of budget constraints, but because it’s otherwise superfluous. And it’s not superficial; everything from the 300m water-resistance to the generous application of luminous paint, the anti-reflective coating and even the 120-click bezel on the U1-EMN all function to a standard expected of a watch that dares to be so bold.

But because the design is unique, these Unimatic watches avoid coming across like homages—they’re more akin to actual watches from the era that have been held in a time warp. Back then, a utilitarian diver had no need for frippery, and so the Sea-Dwellers and PloProfs of the time were brutally simple and without adornment—just like these Unimatics.

I’m no designer, but I know when something feels like it’s been ‘designed’, made to give an impression but trying a bit too hard to do it. Unimatic has somehow avoided that trap, the U2-C offering the sense that it was arrived upon through reasons of practicality rather than aesthetic, decisions like the Seiko NH35A offering a sense of rugged reliability rather than outright economy. Even the U1-EMN, which is obviously stylised with its black DLC case and minimalist bezel, it doesn’t come across as try-hard, just an alternative to the original for those who might want something a bit extra.

For a modest budget, Unimatic has done something very interesting. There are a lot of affordable watches, and many of them blend into each other, but here we have a take on the inexpensive that stands out in a unique way without being fussy and overcomplicated. These watches will never compete with those ten times their cost, obviously, but do you know what? Comparing them like that misses the point entirely. What we want to know is does this brand get an “Ooh!” from you?