Making of the Benguela – The Case

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This is the first of our ‘Making of the Benguela’ series which will give you some insights into the creative process for our super-deep dive watch. We’ll be sharing interesting tidbits, technical info and discussions about some of the design decisions we’ve made, so please make sure you whitelist us – you don’t want to miss an update!

As with any of our designs, it started off with pencil and paper. Originally we thought of creating a barrelled multi-part case. The central part would being anodized aluminium.

The idea was that the lugs would attach to this ring as separate pieces. We discussed it with our case manufacturer. With aluminium being a very soft metal, there was a concern that the lugs may not attach firmly and would reduce the structural integrity of the case. 

We knew we wanted this watch to be more extreme and we had fallen in love with the hooded lugs. Merging the parts into a singular shape, we aligned the case design with our other watches (Tugela, Peregrine and Kalahari) albeit with hooded lugs.

After a bit of research, we discovered that hooded lugs are actually pretty common in the watch world. Notable vintage designs from Seiko, Omega and Rado all used hooded lugs at some point. More recently Tudor has revived a design with hooded lugs, which also act as a locking mechanism for the bezel.

Although the curved hooded lugs on the Benguela do make the lug to lug distance appear longer, the actual springbar to springbar distance is relatively short (43.6mm), which we believe will make for an extremely comfortable wear.

We’re now waiting for the samples to arrive and preparing for the launch. There are a few things we’ll ask our fans for input on, so make sure you stay tuned!