Hilli Watch Company: The Sport Chronograph, the Founder, and the Story Behind Both

Hilli is a British microbrand started by Roberto Campolucci-Bordi after he grew nervous about wearing the Rolex he had bought in London and could not find anything convincing to replace it with under £1,000. That gap became the Sport Chronograph, a £277 mecha-quartz panda-dial watch built over three years with a manufacturer in China.

I was in England visiting my girlfriend, and learned that Roberto lived nearby, so we met up at a cafe, heard the full story, and tried the watch on my own wrist. The backstory explains the watch better than the spec sheet does.

A Rolex That Turned Into a Liability

Roberto told me he sketched his first watch design twenty years ago, long before Hilli existed as a company or even an idea. Watches were always the thing, not a business plan he backed into.

What actually pushed him to start Hilli happened much more recently. He moved to London and bought himself a Rolex, the watch most people still treat as the milestone purchase. Then he got nervous wearing it. London’s spate of moped riders snatching watches off wrists in seconds has been a real and reported problem for years, and Roberto was not interested in becoming a headline. He wanted something he could enjoy without calculating the risk every time he left the house.

Nothing Between £300 and £1,800 Fit

So he went looking for a replacement, something under £1,000 that still felt like a proper watch rather than a placeholder. He tried a Tissot he liked well enough at around £1,800, but it did not fully click. That near miss is the actual origin of the Sport Chronograph’s design. He was not chasing a mood board or a trend, he was trying to solve his own shopping problem and running out of options.

Hilli exists because a fairly specific, fairly common frustration went unanswered: wanting a well-made chronograph without spending Rolex or even Tissot money on it. That is a more honest starting point than most microbrand origin stories I hear.

Three years ago, Roberto reached out directly to a manufacturer in China rather than going through an agency or a design studio. He met the person he would end up working with, and the two of them built the watch together, design and specs, back and forth, over that time.

That is a far more hands-on process than how most affordable watch brands actually get made, where a name gets stamped on a catalog case with a few tweaks. Whether you rate that approach depends on what you think a brand owes its buyers. I think it matters, because it means the compromises in the final watch are the ones Roberto chose, not ones a supplier defaulted to.

Borrowing the Vocabulary of Chronographs You Already Know

The Sport Chronograph leans hard on the tri-register panda dial layout that racing chronographs from the 1960s and 70s made famous, and that a long line of watches since has borrowed from. Hilli is not pretending otherwise. The pitch is that you get the same visual language most of us already recognize and like, at a price that does not require pretending £1,800 is a starting budget.

I get why some collectors roll their eyes at that. It is not a new design. But the same design language shows up on watches costing ten times as much, repackaged with a different name on the dial. The honest question is not whether Hilli invented anything, it is whether the execution holds up on its own terms. That is where trying the watch mattered more than reading about it.

The bracelet finishing was one of the first things that pulled me toward this brand before I had touched anything, and having it on my wrist confirmed it. The brushed center links and polished bevels are done properly, not the flat, slightly soft finishing you get used to seeing at this price.

The Blue Panda in particular caught me off guard. It is a shade of blue I don’t remember seeing on a watch dial before, somewhere between periwinkle and cobalt, not the navy or steel blue most brands default to. Roberto told me it’s called cornflower blue, and once he said it, no other name would have fit.

The bezel is also worth pointing out. It is not just ceramic, which would already be unusual at this price, it is color-matched to each dial, so the Blue Panda gets a blue ceramic bezel and the Green Panda gets green, rather than every version defaulting to the same black insert. That is a detail I would expect on a watch two or three times the price, not one hovering around £277.

The rest held up too. The chronograph pushers on the Seiko VK63 mecha-quartz movement engage with a crisp, mechanical-feeling click rather than the mushy give some mecha-quartz chronographs have. On the wrist, at 39mm across and 12.5mm thick, the case sat comfortably and did not feel like it was overcompensating for anything. I checked the dial printing under magnification, and it held up clean, no bleed, no misalignment on the tachymeter or the sub-dials, and not a single dust speck on sight. Not many brands can relate (big or small).

Specs, Pricing & Availability

A Founder’s Set That Makes You an Actual Shareholder

Roberto is now selling a Founder’s Set: all five Panda dials, Classic, Reverse, Green, Pink and Blue, together in a numbered collector’s case, limited to 20 sets. It costs £1,385, which is exactly five watches at £277 with nothing added on top for the case or the packaging.

The twist is what comes with it. Each set includes one ordinary share in Hilli Watch Company, so the 20 people who buy this are not just collectors, they own a piece of the company itself. Every case is individually numbered, and that same set number is engraved on the case back of each of the five watches inside it, so a set stays traceable as a unit rather than five watches that happen to ship together.

Handing early buyers an actual stake in the business is a different move than the usual limited-run numbering that most brands lean on to create scarcity. It ties those 20 people to how Hilli does over the next few years, not just to owning a rare dial color. I would not buy this set for the share itself, since Hilli has not published what percentage of the company it represents or what rights come attached to it, and I am not going to guess at that. Buy the Founder’s Set because you want all five dials, and treat the share as a genuinely nice bonus rather than the reason to do it.

Where I Land on It

A watch built to solve one person’s actual problem, at a price he set because he remembered exactly how it felt to be priced out, tends to land better than one built to fill a catalog slot. The Sport Chronograph is not reinventing the chronograph. It is making a fairly specific slice of it, the panda dial, tri-register look most of us already like, available without the markup that usually comes attached to it.

What sold me was not the story alone, it was that the watch backs it up: a bracelet finished properly, a bezel color-matched instead of phoned in, a dial that holds up under a loupe, and 5 colour variants you don’t see everywhere. Roberto built this because he wanted it to exist for himself first, and that shows in the parts that are easiest to fake and hardest to get right.