Geneva Watch Days: Is Bigger Better?
The biggest ever edition of Geneva Watch Days may be the shape of things to come.
It was not all that long ago that the tradition of multi-brand watch trade shows seemed to be on life support. The Baselworld show, which had begun as the Mustermesse Basel industrial show in 1917, was dealt what in retrospect was a death blow by the departure from the show of the entire Swatch Group in 2019, and in 2020, the coup de grace was administered by the announcement that Rolex, Tudor, Patek Philippe, Chanel, and Chopard would no longer participate as well. The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie was stung in 2018 by the announcements from Richard Mille and Audemars Piguet that they would no longer participate and SIHH was re-branded Watches And Wonders – and then skipped 2020 completely thanks to the pandemic. The lack of centralized trade shows did not seem to impact business in the slightest – in 2021 and again in 2022, Switzerland posted record values for exported watches, in excess of CHF 22 billion each year.
But the trade shows are back. Watches & Wonders attracted 43,000 visitors, with keystone brands like Patek, Rolex, Tudor, Chopard, and Grand Seiko participating, and its rapidly growing counterpart, Geneva Watch Days, which began in 2020 with just fifteen brands, just closed at the end of August with forty brands participating – incredible growth for just three years. Not exactly what you’d expect as the consequence of a period in which trade shows seemed on the ropes and business was better than ever.
Building a better show
Geneva Watch Days is different in a number of key respects from its predecessors, and from Watches & Wonders. Both of the Two Big former shows were centered around large pavilions – the Palexpo in Geneva, situated un-charmingly across the highway from the airport, for SIHH; the Messeplatz in Basel for Baselworld; both big enough that you could, to paraphrase Hemingway, park an airship in them if it was a big airship and you wanted to put it there. Watches & Wonders is still in the Palexpo but Geneva Watch days has no central location at all – instead, brands make their own arrangements, showing either at their brand boutiques in central Geneva, or in suites at one of the hotels on the lake.
The decentralized nature of the show has a lot of advantages, for both visitors and exhibitors. For one thing, the show costs a fraction of the price of participation in a traditional trade show. Brands pay fees to the organizing committee and are then free to make their own arrangements in terms of where and when to show their timepieces. Jean-Christophe Babin, the CEO of BVLGARI, speaking to Business of Fashion, said that while Watches & Wonders would have cost his company around CHF 8 million, total costs to BVLGARI for Geneva Watch Days was CHF 1 million. Those savings are hard to ignore even if you’re LVMH.
If you’re a visitor, it’s pretty pleasant to be able to walk from meetings back to your hotel and walk to and from events at night, without relying on either expensive cabs or the shuttle busses that Watches & Wonders (and before, SIHH) run from the hotels out to the airport. We got lucky this year with weather. Geneva had had a major heat wave just before the show, but despite it being the end of August, the unusually cool weather made it a pleasure to walk to appointments.
The two big questions are, what does this mean for collectors and enthusiasts, and where might things go from here?
The answer to the first question is that at least for now, it’s a chance for collectors to actually see watches at a trade show and there were a number of serious collectors and enthusiasts who made the trip to Geneva and meet brands, and see their new pieces, in person, which was very much the exception rather than the rule at the old school trade shows. As a long time member of the watch press, it’s fantastic to see the new pieces in person – there is a limit to how much of a reaction you can plausibly muster to a watch you only see in press photos – but where I think there’s a huge opportunity for the show is to increase, as much as possible, public exposure and experiences for their clients.
The other somewhat missed opportunity was a chance for the Only Watch entrants to be shown – this year it’s going to be difficult to see all of the Only Watch pieces together thanks to some production issues, as well as shipping issues – the URWERK Space Time Blade, for instance, which is six feet tall and enclosed in a glass tube, would require the services of an art shipping company and a darned skilled one at that. But in general the pros certainly outweighed the cons and there was an informality and genuineness about the proceedings that would be harder to create on a less intimate scale.
And based on remarks from a couple of key sponsors of the show, Geneva Watch Days is only going to get bigger (although selfishly, this makes me wish for something like a central press center – if we’d had the same stinking hot weather for the show that Geneva had had just the week before people would have shown up for appointments looking like wet dogs). As a first year attendee, I loved the intimate scale and I hope the feel of the show stays more or less the same even if it gets bigger (which seems likely).
The analogy to wondering if your fave indie band is going to change, man, because they just signed a contract with a major label breaks down a little bit when one of your tentpole exhibitors is BVLGARI and another one is Breitling, but still, for exhibitors, enthusiasts, and press alike, it’s to be hoped that the fun factor stays as high as it was this year, in years to come.