Is it the same Seagull from AliExpress?

In July I posted the Guacam0le for the first time and a follower I did not know left the question a lot of people must have asked in silence: “Is this watch made by Seagull? Like, the same Seagull from AliExpress?”

I answered on the spot, a little defensively: the movement is, yes, but it is assembled in England. The answer was right and far too short. The question deserves the whole text, because the story of that movement is better than its reputation.

The movement came from Switzerland, in crates

What beats inside the Guacam0le is a Seagull ST1901, a hand-wound column-wheel chronograph. It is written on the dial, right under the model name: Bicompax is the watch, two counters; ST-1901 is the calibre. Before it was Chinese, it was Swiss. The Venus factory, in Moutier, made the calibre 175 in the 1940s and 1950s, a column-wheel chronograph used by brands that cost a lot at auction today. When Venus needed money, it tried to sell the machinery and the drawings of the 175 to the Soviet Union, which refused. China accepted.

On the Chinese side, the buyer had a code name. Project 304 was the Ministry of Light Industry programme to develop a wrist chronograph for the air force. In 1961 the task went to the Tianjin watch factory, which bought the Venus machines, took the movement from 17 to 19 jewels and renamed it ST19. The second prototypes were ready in 1963. In 1966 the factory delivered 1,400 watches to the air force.

That is the watch sold today as the “Seagull 1963” on any marketplace, and that is where the reputation of a cheap AliExpress watch comes from. The movement is the same. What changes is everything around it.

What Studio Underd0g does with it

Studio Underd0g started in London in early 2020, as the pandemic project of a designer called Richard Benc. The brand's website tells the beginning with a jab: the biggest news in the watch world in 2020 was that a certain brand would grow the case of one model by up to a millimetre. “Thrilling.” Hence the brief he gave himself: a serious watch that does not take itself too seriously. He studied product engineering and designed character watches (Mickey, Star Wars) before working for bigger brands, mainly Braun. The idea of the brand, in the website's words, is “a serious watch that doesn't take itself too seriously”. The zero in place of the “o” comes from the gamer habit of swapping a letter in a name to stand out.

The first watch was the Watermel0n, a 38.5 mm chronograph with a watermelon dial, and the movement chosen was already the ST1901: a small case, hand winding, a column wheel, a price that fitted inside a watch under a thousand dollars. The watermelon inspiration, according to Benc himself, was a Hodinkee article about a Rolex GMT with a yellow and green bezel designed by an eight-year-old. About the rest he says he wishes he had a better story, but has no idea where the watermelon came from.

In 2024 it almost ended. Seagull announced that, from 1 May, it would only sell the ST19 in minimum lots of ten thousand units, and only to its own brands. For a small brand that is a sentence. Underd0g negotiated a contract and came out with an exclusive version, the ST1901-B: a swan-neck regulator with a tighter tolerance (the brand states between −10 and +15 seconds a day), a black mainplate, darkened internal components. The third generation of the 01Series, launched in November 2024, brought that movement, a case 0.7 mm thinner (from 13.6 to 12.9 mm) and the words “Assembled in Great Britain” on the dial.

The current catalogue of the generation is a single calibre with different dials: Watermel0n, Go0fy Panda, Desert Sky, Mint Ch0c Chip, and the Guacam0le while it lasted.

Each watch is assembled from start to finish by a single person, and the initials of whoever assembled it go on the paper that comes with the box. The workshop has a name, The D0ghouse, and sits in Maidenhead, west of London; you can book a showroom visit on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and you can sit at the bench and assemble your own 01Series next to one of their watchmakers.

The brand also keeps on its website, in large letters, what people say about it: among the praise from the press, two comments from people who hate it, one calling the fans a cult, the other calling the owners greedy. It is there, scrolling in the footer, along with the rest.

So the answer to the follower is: yes, it is Seagull, but it is not the same one. The calibre is a variant made only for them, and the assembly, the regulation and the quality control are from London, not from Tianjin.

The Guacam0le was born from a copy

The part I did not know when I bought it. In January 2024 Underd0g found out that a Chinese brand called Proxima was selling a copy of the Watermel0n, with the same design, the same palette and even the same text on the dial. The listing, which Underd0g quotes in full on its website on purpose, was called “New PX1717 of Mens Modify ST1902 Watermelon Dial Waterproof Chronograph Mechanical Wristwatches Domed Sapphire”. Proxima also made an “Avocado Color” version, which did not exist in the original catalogue.

Benc sued nobody. He copied the copy. “Should we call the lawyers? No, we called the design department”, says the collection page, which was named The Unoriginals, “the copy of a copy”. In April 2025 the brand announced two chronographs inspired by Proxima's “avocado colour”: the Av0cado, with a yellow dial and a green tachymeter ring, and the Guacam0le, in a lighter green with the minute counter in dark green. According to Watch Advice, he put the two to a vote on Instagram, it ended in a tie, and he made both. The sale lasted nine hours, on 8 May 2025, and it was a limited edition: it ended when the window closed. In those nine hours more than 3,300 watches went out, a figure from the brand itself.

It was not an isolated case. Almost every year the brand does an edition with someone: Pizza Party, in two rounds, with Time+Tide; Alliance 02 with Christopher Ward; Champagne & Caviar for Massena LAB; The Manhattan, Mim0sa and Gimlet for Fears; Project Passion with H. Moser; SB05 Sunflower with Sartory Billard; Uneggspected for Wristcheck; Half ’N’ Half and Pumpkin for Mary’s Meals; Eastern Arabic for Perpétuel; Blueberry for Everywatch; Aubergine for Fratello; and the Guava, which you can only buy at the D0ghouse. None of them looks like a serious watch, and all of them use the same movement.

His line at the launch sums up the spirit: even the big Swiss brands are copied and, with all the money they have, rarely manage to shut the copiers down; he preferred to look for a more creative answer, and “even a slightly sour situation can turn into something unexpectedly good”.