After 50 years in a corporate job, Peter Sargison drew a dive watch, went through three manufacturers to get it made, and saw it funded on Kickstarter in 33 minutes. Seven years on, Second Hour is still building on that first design
Australia rarely tops the list when people think of great watchmaking, but Melbourne’s Second Hour has spent the past seven years making a compelling case for it. The brand turned seven in July, and it marked the occasion with the Gin Clear Mosaic, a 50-piece limited edition with a three-dimensional mosaic dial in graduated blues. All 50 are now sold.
That’s a result plenty of microbrands would take, in a part of the watch world where a lot of launches can sometimes fizzle out. Second Hour started with a drawing shown to strangers, so how did it get here?
Peter Sargison – co-founder of Second Hour alongside his wife, Akira – spent decades working a corporate job. He was in technology and transformation for 30 years, running complex projects for other people, and he was good at it. But the urge to make something of his own never went away. Those years had taught him, in his words, “how to execute, how to manage complexity, how to see a project through”.
Away from the office he dived, and that’s where the watch really began. His divemaster training took him to Nusa Lembongan in Indonesia and Crystal Bay off neighbouring Nusa Penida, where the currents can change fast enough to threaten a dive party, and in water like that you soon learn what reliable kit and a quick decision are worth. The Gin Clear took its priorities from those dives and its name from the clearest water he’d ever dived in.
Design wasn’t one of his skills, but he sat down and drew a watch anyway, then showed it to a community of watch enthusiasts online, fully expecting to be told what was wrong with it. They liked it. “That reaction told me I wasn’t just making something for myself,” he says.
Getting it made was the harder part. Of the three suppliers he approached, the first was dropped for serious quality failures and the second for chronic delays. The third came good, and in September 2019 he held a prototype in his hands for the first time, a watch that until then had only existed as drawings and decisions.
That watch, the Gin Clear Diver, went to Kickstarter in March 2020. It had everything a serious diver needs: 200m water resistance, a 41.55mm steel case with a ceramic bezel, a Sellita movement and trapezoid markers at 12, four and eight set among classic dive circles, all for under £400 at early-bird pricing. Hitting its goal in 33 minutes, with stretch goals following inside 12 hours, is what really put Second Hour on the map.
The second campaign was the real test of whether that was luck. The Mandala, a sport and dress watch with an artisan guilloche dial, launched on Kickstarter just a year later in 2021. It hit its goal in seven minutes and finished in more than three times that goal. That settled the question of whether Second Hour was a brand or a one-off.
From there the range kept growing, with the dressier Sattelberg in 2022 and a run of updates and additions across 2023 and 2024, among them the Gin Clear Mk2, which sold out more than once, and the Art Deco Memoir – a dress watch with a Cartier Tank-inspired shape. The Memoir later got some colour updates in 2025 including pale blue, silver, and salmon pink.
The Mandala Mk3 brought the guilloche dial back in new colours as well, on a watch the brand pitches as refined enough for dinner and rugged enough for the tennis court. A purple version followed more recently, at the end of October.
The Fusion, released last October, shows how Second Hour now works. It puts the Sattelberg’s case and bracelet together with the Mandala’s dial and keeps the dive-style layout and its trapezoids but drops the dive bezel – sensible on a watch more likely to see a restaurant than a reef.
The Gin Clear Mk3, launched in April this year, is the original Gin Clear in its third form, reworked where you can feel it. The lugs now take a wider range of aftermarket straps, which matters more than it sounds, because swapping straps is half the fun of owning a dive watch. The ball-bearing bezel clicks crisply, the new Emerald and Dark Rhodium dials come with bezels matched to them, and the case is now 40mm and rated to 300m, up from the original’s 200m. The Mosaic is the same watch with a three-dimensional mosaic dial that graduates from light blue to deeper blue.
Seven years in, the pattern is hard to miss. The Gin Clear is on its third form and so is the Mandala, so Second Hour keeps going back to what worked and improving it, while adding new ideas like the Sattelberg, Memoir and the Fusion alongside. Peter still presents the watches to enthusiasts himself, including at shows in Melbourne, so the people who liked that first drawing can still meet him.
“The watches we make now are the watches I wanted to exist when I started,” he says. “That’s still the brief.”
More details at Second Hour.
