Seiko launches new limited-edition panda chronograph: Panda-eye subdials, bamboo-leaf hands and ear-shaped pushers

Seiko has opened pre-orders for a chronograph designed to look like an actual panda, two years after the watch first appeared as a concept. The power design project panda chronograph is limited to 5,000 pieces and costs $540 in the US, £510 in the UK, and €590 in Europe, with deliveries expected from November.

Designer Kiyotaka Sakai created the watch, first shown in 2024 under the name Pandagraph, after his son told him that his panda-dial chronograph was not really a panda. Collectors use the term for any chronograph with a light dial and contrasting dark subdials. Sakai set out to design one that his son would recognize as the animal.

The white dial carries a texture meant to resemble fur. The black subdials at 3 and 9 o’clock are shaped like a panda’s eye patches, and a nose and mouth sit below the central hands. The hour and minute hands are shaped like bamboo leaves. In place of a tachymeter, the dial carries what Seiko calls a Sasameter, calibrated so that a two-minute timing reads 30km/h, which the company gives as a panda’s theoretical top speed. The chronograph pushers are positioned at the top of the case, where they form the panda’s ears.

The production model comes in the concept’s original white as the HHK001 and in a new pink version, the HHK002, which Seiko says was inspired by a newborn panda. Seiko will make 3,000 of the white watches and 2,000 of the pink ones.

The stainless steel case measures 43mm across and 14.6mm thick. Inside is Seiko’s 8T61 quartz chronograph movement, rated to ±15 seconds a month. Oracle of Time notes that the quartz calibre accommodates the top-mounted pushers, a layout that would be harder to achieve with a conventional mechanical chronograph movement.

The power design project is Seiko’s internal design laboratory, where its designers build experimental concepts for public exhibition. It ran from 2001 to 2009 and returned in 2022 as a series of exhibitions in Tokyo. Its first commercial release, the Collection 1, reworked Seiko’s 1980s Tissé and went on sale last December at €405 to €450 in runs of 500 per finish, all of which sold out.

Seiko teased the panda chronograph in late September with a silhouette of a panda eating bamboo and the line “Who are you?” The watch is separate from the Prospex Speedtimer SSC813, a solar chronograph that also uses a panda-style dial.