News · Anders & Co

Anders & Co rebuilds the watch it started with, and cuts five dials out of stone

The Gothenburg brand's first chronograph comes back with a reworked case, drilled lugs and dials in mother of pearl, onyx, turquoise, red jasper and bloodstone.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 24 August 2026

• Anders & Co has reworked the AC1 Chronograph that launched the brand, keeping the 38mm proportions but reprofiling the case, sharpening the finishing and drilling the lugs.
• The dials are cut from five natural stones, mother of pearl, black onyx, turquoise, red jasper and bloodstone, with the red jasper carrying Eastern Arabic numerals.
• Prices run from SEK 6,900 to SEK 7,490 direct from the brand, which publishes no separate Australian figure, and the movement is a Seiko VK64 meca-quartz.

The hardest watch a small brand ever has to make is the second version of its first one. A debut gets forgiven a great deal, because it is a statement of intent and everybody understands the budget it was made on. Come back a few years later with better tooling, better suppliers and a customer base that has since handled a lot of nicer metal, and the same design has to survive being looked at properly. Anders & Co has just put its debut through that, and the reworked AC1 Chronograph arrives with five natural stone dials.

The numbers that did not move, and everything around them that did

The proportions are untouched: 38mm across, 11.3mm deep, 46mm from lug tip to lug tip, and 20mm between them. What has changed is everything those figures cannot describe. Anders & Co lists a reworked case profile, altered lug geometry, cleaner transitions into the bezel, and a sharper boundary between the mirror-polished and satin-brushed surfaces. That last one is the sort of revision that reads as nothing on a specification sheet and as a great deal in the hand, because a soft edge between two finishes is the single clearest tell of a cheap case.

The lugs are now drilled, which turns a strap change from a careful operation with a spring bar tool into something you do at the kitchen table. Water resistance is quoted at 5 ATM, and the brand presents it as an upgrade. Read it exactly: 50 metres is rain, a sink, and someone knocking a drink into your lap. It is not a swim, and the closed screw-down caseback does not change that.

Five stones, and one of them is quietly the best of them

The dials are cut from mother of pearl, black onyx, turquoise, red jasper and bloodstone, each slab individually selected, and Anders & Co makes the usual and entirely true point that no two will match. What lifts this above a colour chart is that the stones have been chosen to do different jobs. The turquoise arrives shot through with dark matrix veining that wanders across the dial like a crack in glaze, and the red jasper carries Eastern Arabic numerals, which is a genuinely uncommon thing to find on a Scandinavian chronograph.

Bloodstone is the pick. It is a dark green jasper flecked with red iron oxide, and across a dial this size the flecks scatter like something spilled and left to dry. The name is medieval and lurid and, for once, the material earns it. Against polished steel and white printing it reads almost black until the light finds it, at which point the green comes up and the red specks appear one at a time.

The furniture on top is conventional in the good way. Faceted Dauphine hands filled with Swiss Super-LumiNova, applied baton markers, an Arabic 12 and 6, and a flange carrying both a telemetre and a tachymetre scale. A telemetre measures the distance to something you saw before you heard it, which on a Gothenburg dress chronograph is a function I would gently describe as aspirational.

The VK64 question, which is really a question about where the money went

The movement is a Seiko VK64, a meca-quartz: quartz timekeeping with a mechanical chronograph module, so the pushers snap and the central hand flies back to zero the way a mechanical chronograph does, without the price of one. There are two registers, a sixty-unit counter at nine and a twenty-four hour counter at three, and a double-domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating over the lot.

This is the part that will divide people, and it should. Roughly seven thousand kronor buys a slab of genuine turquoise, a properly finished 38mm case and a battery. The same money spent on a mechanical chronograph tends to arrive with a plainer dial, because the movement has eaten the budget. Anders & Co has decided that what you look at every day matters more than what is ticking underneath it, and having now looked at the bloodstone, I find that harder to argue with than I expected to.

Anders & Co AC1 Chronograph pricing and availability

The AC1 Chronograph launched on 11 August and is sold direct from Anders & Co, which prices in Swedish kronor and publishes no separate Australian figure. Mother of pearl and black onyx are SEK 6,900, turquoise and the Eastern Arabic red jasper are SEK 6,990, and bloodstone is SEK 7,490. The brand quotes free worldwide shipping and a twelve month warranty. Stock from the launch batch ships immediately, and once that is gone the next production run moves to pre-order, which is the standard small-brand arrangement and the standard small-brand risk.

Anders & Co describes what it does as limited production rather than limited editions, and puts no edition number on the caseback, which matters more than it sounds. A natural stone dial is limited by the stone rather than by a certificate, so the real constraint is how many slabs come out of the saw worth using, not how many a marketing plan decided to permit. That is the honest version of scarcity, and it is the one that suits this watch. Whether the veining you get is the veining you fell for on the website is the question every stone dial buyer eventually makes peace with, and with five stones to choose between, it is a pleasant enough argument to lose.