Second Hour Turns Seven With the Sold-Out Gin Clear Mosaic

Second Hour is a reminder that modern watchmaking doesn’t only happen in the expected places.

The Melbourne brand, founded by Peter Sargison and his wife Akira, has reached its seventh year with a limited Gin Clear Mosaic that sold through all 50 pieces.

For a company that began with a hand-drawn dive watch and an audience of online enthusiasts, that’s a quietly convincing milestone.

At a glance

• Second Hour has marked its seventh anniversary with the Gin Clear Mosaic, a 50-piece limited edition that is now sold out.
• The watch is based on the Gin Clear Mk3 and features a three-dimensional mosaic dial in graduated blues.
• The Melbourne brand traces its momentum back to the original Gin Clear Diver, which reached its Kickstarter goal in 33 minutes in 2020.

From dive training to a first watch

Before Second Hour, Sargison spent 30 years in technology and transformation, running complex corporate projects rather than building watches.

He has credited that career with teaching him “how to execute, how to manage complexity, how to see a project through”.

The spark for the Gin Clear came away from the office, during his divemaster training around Nusa Lembongan in Indonesia and Crystal Bay off neighbouring Nusa Penida.

Those waters helped shape the practical priorities of the first watch, where reliable timing and legibility mattered more than decorative excess.

Sargison has said the Gin Clear name came from the clearest water he had ever dived in.

He wasn’t a trained designer, but he drew the watch and put it in front of an online community of enthusiasts, expecting criticism.

Instead, the reaction suggested there was a market beyond his own wrist.

“That reaction told me I wasn’t just making something for myself,” Sargison has said.

The Gin Clear proved the idea had legs

Turning the drawing into a watch was not straightforward.

Sargison went through three suppliers before reaching a finished prototype, with the first dropped for serious quality failures and the second for chronic delays.

In September 2019, he finally held the prototype of the Gin Clear Diver.

The watch reached Kickstarter in March 2020 with a 41.55mm steel case, 200 metres of water resistance, a ceramic bezel, a Sellita movement and a dial defined by trapezoid markers at 12, four and eight among traditional dive circles.

Early-bird pricing was under £400, and the campaign hit its funding goal in 33 minutes.

Stretch goals followed within 12 hours, giving Second Hour the kind of debut that many young independent brands spend years chasing.

Mandala, Memoir and the shape of a range

The second test arrived in 2021 with the Mandala, a sport and dress watch built around an artisan guilloche dial.

Its Kickstarter campaign hit its goal in seven minutes and finished at more than three times that target.

That result moved Second Hour beyond the status of a single successful launch.

The collection grew again with the dressier Sattelberg in 2022, followed by updates and additions across 2023 and 2024.

The Gin Clear Mk2 sold out more than once, while the Art Deco Memoir introduced a dress watch with a Cartier Tank-inspired shape.

In 2025, the Memoir received colour updates including pale blue, silver and salmon pink.

The Mandala Mk3 brought the guilloche dial back in new colours, with Second Hour positioning it as refined enough for dinner and robust enough for a tennis court.

A purple Mandala Mk3 followed at the end of October.

The Fusion, released last October, shows the brand’s current habit of remixing its own design language rather than abandoning it.

It combines the Sattelberg’s case and bracelet with the Mandala’s dial, keeps the dive-style layout and trapezoid markers, and removes the dive bezel for a watch aimed less at the reef and more at daily wear.

The Gin Clear Mk3 and its anniversary Mosaic dial

The Gin Clear Mk3, launched in April this year, is the original concept in a more mature form.

The case is now 40mm and rated to 300 metres, up from the original model’s 200 metres.

Second Hour also reworked the lugs to accept a wider range of aftermarket straps, a practical detail that matters to collectors who like changing the character of a watch without changing the watch itself.

The ball-bearing bezel was designed for a crisp action, while the Emerald and Dark Rhodium dial versions use matching bezels.

The anniversary Gin Clear Mosaic takes the same platform and adds a three-dimensional mosaic dial that moves from lighter blue to deeper blue.

With only 50 pieces made and all now sold, it sits as both a celebration of the brand’s first seven years and a sign of how far the original dive watch has travelled.

Details & Specifications

Seven years on, Second Hour looks less like an outlier and more like a disciplined independent brand with a clear memory of where it started.

“The watches we make now are the watches I wanted to exist when I started,” Sargison has said. “That’s still the brief.”