Cool Britannia: Scurfa

Scurfa Watches is run by husband-and-wife team Paul and Alison Scurfield and is based in the northeast of England. PauI is a professional diver and designs all the watches himself, normally whilst in saturation. It comes as no surprise then that the collections are all dive-style with the Diver One model being the longest running. Paul spends around six months offshore diving, so they can only handle so many watches a year. Popular designs are often replaced for new models which means that this makes all their models pretty limited.

What started your interest in watches?

It has to be James Bond and that Rolex (the 6538 “Big Crown” Submariner that Bond wore in Dr. No) that led to my love of diving and diving watches. I grew up in the northeast of England, in the seaside town of South Shields, and I had contact with lots of divers. It was common knowledge that the Comex diving vessels used the local port for maintenance and repairs. The local secondhand shops were full of “Comex” Rolex watches, and I used to look at them in the windows as a lad.

Loving dive watches and then setting up a dive watch brand is a big leap, though!

It was pretty much an accident, to be honest. Lots of professional divers have old Rolex watches and as the value increased, they stopped using them at work or sold them. So, we were looking for an affordable but reliable alternative. The offshore diving supply company Divex offered a good little quartz model but they became hard to find. So, out of necessity, I started looking into making some dive watches myself.

How did you begin this process?

It was hard looking for a partner who would make watches based on my designs in [the] small numbers that I was looking to make them in. After a lot of searching and a few wrong turns, I managed to make three models in quartz. I believe a diving watch for working divers should be quartz, as if you hit an automatic watch hard enough, it can stop. At first, all the watches I made were sold to workmates and friends of friends. At the end of 2012, I had a long spell off work due to a ship’s refit, and I thought I would try and sell some of the watches online. By 2013, the micro-brand watch market was emerging, and we had a good response on the dive watch forums. We have made a lot of friends over the past nine years, and I always consult with some members, a mix of professional divers and dive watch collectors on future designs, and receive a lot of positive input.