Issue 127: Why can't London host a world-class watch event?

Why SalonQP failed, and what's holding WatchPro Salon back

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is astounded to realise we have already arrived at the business end of the year. It’s event season! Auction season! Awards season! In the next couple of weeks I will be bringing you my own unique take on the GPHG awards live from Geneva, as well as a dispatch from TAG Heuer’s collector forum. For now, however, my thoughts are closer to home, as I reflect on my own involvement with large scale watch events and the difficulty in pulling them off. As I write this, I’m about to walk into WatchPro Salon, where hopefully I’ll pick up plenty of gossip and intel for next week’s newsletter. I know it’ll feel warm and welcoming, full of friends and colleagues, and it’s great that London has a watch fair at all, but I also think it’s only partway there in terms of delivering the kind of event our city deserves. Read on to find out why.

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Harrods Tudor Leaked: Details Confirmed
My Take On The Patek Philippe Cubitus
The Truth About Water Resistance
Everything I Learned About Hairsprings By Visiting Minerva
Hall’s Gastronomy of Watchmaking

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I caught up with a friend in the industry recently and in passing, he mentioned that he had looked into buying the domain name and social accounts for London Watch Week. “Think about it,” he said. “We’ve just had Milan Watch Week, you’ve got Dubai Watch Week… it’s something that needs to happen.” There is also LVMH Watch Week, held somewhere nice and warm every January, and a brief google informs me that there have also been such events as Madison Avenue Watch Week and Neighbourhood Watch Week, although I think that last one might not be purely horological in nature. Geneva Watch Days might not be a full week but it’s as good as, and I’ve heard Watches & Wonders referred to informally as Geneva Watch Week now that there are so many ‘pirates’ hanging onto the rigging of the main event.

My opportunistic colleague has certainly got a point. Since the duopoly of Baselworld and SIHH morphed into the situation we have today, the calendar of watch events (and product releases) has multiplied and diversified with remarkable enthusiasm. There were always regional watch shows: SIAR in Mexico, Inhorgenta in Munich, Belles Montres in Paris, WatchTime in New York and many others. But the Swiss fairs were the only ones you had to be at, the only ones where you’d really see new launches other than market-specific limited editions and the ones that set the tone, and the tempo, of the industry for the year. Now, Watches and Wonders Geneva has emerged as the single, dominant moment in the horological calendar, with Geneva Watch Days probably second - so you might argue we still have a Swiss duopoly and it’s even less diverse than before. But I think that’s a selective argument; for me the balance of power and influence is more globally spread than ever before, with events every month that will bring international travellers and see brands unveil significant new watches. Social media has made the world a smaller place, and the lines between brand, retailer, media and consumer have all become blurred in the last decade.

But what about London? Why does it feel as though my home city can’t pull the watch world to its streets in the same way that Hong Kong, New York, Dubai or Singapore can? It’s a city on the world stage with a globally recognised presence financially, culturally and historically, as well as being the fifth largest export market for Swiss watches, a position it has held for the last five years. London has wealth, status, some of the most famous luxury stores and shopping streets in the world, no shortage of hotels and amenities to entertain visitors, pretty decent transport links (in stark contrast to the rest of the UK), and an unassailable position in horological history. It’s the city of Arnold, Tompion, Mudge, Graham, Dent, Quare, Frodsham and more. It was in London that John Harrison solved the problem of longitudinal navigation, and right here in London, about half an hour by bus from my front door, you’ll find the Greenwich Meridian. Zero hour for the world.¹ Rolex was founded here, too.

London has, and has had, watch events, of course. It is no coincidence that this newsletter goes out mere minutes before the doors open on WatchPro Salon 2024. I don’t think it’s a bad event at all but it doesn’t attract the biggest brands, isn’t pulling journalists, influencers and serious collectors from around the world (or even across the country necessarily), and perhaps most significantly of all isn’t generating much in the way of buzz. The upstart British Watchmakers’ Day, which launched earlier this year, created real hype, generated headlines and had queues around the block. That should worry WatchPro, but there’s surprisingly little crossover between the two events - five exhibitors at WPS this year are members of the British Watch and Clock Makers’ Alliance, while a further four British brands from last year have decided not to return. Personally, I think WatchPro missed the opportunity to establish itself as the champion of British watchmaking, but maybe this means both events can co-exist quite happily.

It’s worth noting at this point that WatchPro Salon has more exhibitors than last year, with 50 confirmed brands, retailers, and other businesses in the watch space taking part. This is only part of the story, however: the make-up of the exhibitor list tells an interesting story about where the market is for events in this country.

In 2022, WPS could count Ball Watch Co, Bonhams, Czapek, Seiko & Grand Seiko, Laurent Ferrier, Leroy, Oris, Speake-Marin and Zodiac among its exhibitors. Last year it had Ball, Czapek, Gerald Charles, Seiko, Sinn and Zodiac. This year, only Bremont and Sinn represent established, mainstream or “luxury” watchmakers. The rest include brands that are established - Mondaine, Victorinox - but aren’t what we think of as prestigious luxury brands, and plenty of brands that are beloved of online audiences like Baltic, Studio Underd0g, and MB&F’s MAD Editions, but overall the show consists of young start-ups and microbrands. It presents an identity crisis for the event: you could lean into it, but you’d alienate the likes of Bremont (which I am surprised to see there at all given the rest of the line-up) and eliminate your chances of ever again appealing to those high-end independents and mid-market mainstream brands. WatchPro already operates a second spin-off event, WatchPro Market, in London’s Brick Lane, aimed at lower-priced brands with no physical retail presence. It’s a smart idea, potentially unique in actually bringing these kind of watches closer to their target audience (affluent creatives, or the people who when I first moved to London 15 years ago were peak Shoreditch hipsters, but now have money for watches). The problem is there already exists a degree of crossover in exhibitors (potentially sold as a package deal) and now, looking at the WatchPro Salon roster, you can easily see the two events converging.

It’s tough, trying to put together this kind of event. I know. I worked at QP Magazine for six years from 2014-2020, hosting five major events (four editions of SalonQP, held at London’s Saatchi Gallery, and one smaller ‘ClubQP’, a smaller-scale event hosted at the Four Seasons Ten Trinity Square). I didn’t personally sell exhibition space or wrangle sponsorship deals but I sat next to the people who did, pulled late nights alongside them and created/curated content and talks for the shows. SalonQP, for anyone not familiar, was the most ambitious watch event hosted in London. It began in 2009, and continued until 2018. When it was good it was great; at its peak it attracted more than 80 exhibitors and more than £1m in revenue. The trouble is, it was phenomenally expensive to run, and that’s just the start.

In many ways, it was ahead of its time. We had new watch launches from mainstream and independent brands; we had talks with individuals that, in the right setting today, would be sell-outs in their own right (Roger Smith, Evelyne Genta, FP Journe) and we had rich, interesting exhibitions on everything from gemstones to chronographs, materials science to the Dirty Dozen. Brands like Fears and Atelier de Chronometrie chose SalonQP to make their world debuts - and there were many more, not all of which have lasted. You could go hands-on with watches from every single brand; we had literally the best watchmakers in the world just waiting for you to walk up and try something on: Andreas Strehler, FP Journe, Voutilainen, Gronefeld, Bovet, Laurent Ferrier, Urban Jurgensen, Breguet… I remember Rexhep Rexhepi looking a little lost as people struggled to know what to make of Akrivia, his stand losing out in the battle for attention with better-known brands. Ludovic Ballouard explained his phenomenal works to a live audience, watched nervously by Swatch Group lawyers, alert to any controversial statements concerning the Opus 13, which he had developed. SalonQP also was able to attract some of the very biggest names. At one time or another we had Tudor, A. Lange & Sohne, Vacheron Constantin, Breguet, TAG Heuer, Zenith, Blancpain, Piaget, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Grand Seiko, Montblanc, Bulgari, Harry Winston and others I’ve probably forgotten.

I say this not (just) to make myself sound successful and important. Nearly everything that was great about SalonQP was down to other people working exceptionally hard behind the scenes; I was one of a few people who got to put on a suit and take (some of) the credit on the night. I say all this to make the point that SalonQP was flipping brilliant - incredible venue, incredible roster of brands, news-worthy launches and a great sense of buzz and community around it - and it still failed. We got thousands of people through the door on opening night, when we were throwing free booze and canapes at them (and how extremely expensive that was), but during the day on the weekend, you had to really work hard to get people in. I suspect that might be different today, as the culture of watches has become more mainstream, social media has evolved to another level, and people are more obsessed than ever with once-obscure watchmakers. But back then it was a struggle and it goes some way to illustrating what a chicken-and-egg business planning events is.

You need good visitor numbers to entice brands to exhibit. You need good brands confirmed to have any chance of getting people through the door. And before you can sell space to a brand, they want to know who else is exhibiting and who they’ll be next to. It’s not, as you might think, that they want to avoid their direct competition - they actually want to know they’ll be there, otherwise they run the risk of appearing like they don’t belong. This can work in your favour, if you’re able to elegantly negotiate the high-wire act (i.e. bullshitting in the hope that it comes true) of telling two or three brands that the others will be taking part. But mostly it’s an enormous headache. I once had a brand pull out of a curated exhibition that I’d put together on alternative materials in watchmaking with about two days to go because Rado was part of the exhibit, and that was an unacceptable comparison for this brand’s ego to bear. Rado! Not the coolest, sure, but not exactly embarrassing company.

This is why I’m surprised Bremont is at WatchPro Salon this year - it’s far and away the most established brand in the room. I’m not sure what the brand strategy is now that the in-house movement is history and prices are a bit lower, but it used to talk of ambitions of being seen as an alternative to IWC or Panerai. Now it’s rubbing shoulders with Serica and Tsar Bomba; worse still, there are brands at WatchPro Salon like Favre-Leuba, Fortis, Sinn and Nivada Grenchen that make watches along similar lines (adventure, action, tool watches etc) but for less money. Not the comparison you want to encourage.

There’s also a significant sense of momentum around annual events that can be very challenging. Barring a bit of marketing spin (“We’re pivoting to a more intimate format!”) it’s expected that you should be roughly the same size and stature year-on-year, if not - ideally - bigger and better. It’s a reductive perspective that ignores market changes, but if people look at your event that used to attract a legion of big hitters and no longer does, they will draw their own obvious conclusions.

It’s easy to blame SalonQP’s demise on market forces, although that would be to overlook many other failings. It lasted too long (although cutting the duration wouldn’t have changed much, because the venue wouldn’t have been able to put on another event on the Sunday), was too expensive to host (the Saatchi Gallery is a stunning building, and it was no surprise that Patek Philippe used it for its London exhibition in 2014, but it cost nigh-on half a million quid just to have the space for three days and that included none of the build, catering, electrics, AV, signage, marketing, ticketing, advertising or the editorial team’s rider of two thousand white roses, sixty bottles of Jack Daniels and a pinball machine). You could dig into how effectively the event was marketed, as well - but good marketing is expensive, and that’s another chicken-and-egg situation to submit to. We tried many different things to sell tickets, and few of them ever really worked. But the biggest problem really was external: big brands stopped wanting to take part in expensive multi-brand events where they weren’t the centre of attention.

This situation still holds true, which is why you won’t see many of the biggest watch brands at any consumer-facing event. They have either invested so much money in their own retail or event spaces (the likes of AP’s Houses, Vacheron Constantin’s Club 1755) that they have to justify it by holding events there, or they don’t want the compromised experience of fighting for attention when they could do something on their own and monopolise the experience. Between 2015 and 2017 brands’ heads were turned by the lure of influencer marketing; huge amounts of money were blown on anything and anyone who looked and sounded like they knew what they were doing on Instagram or YouTube, as the watch industry frantically scrabbled to understand a world it had previously affected to ignore. Nearly a decade later I’m not sure many major watch brands laid strong foundations for a coherent digital presence during this time, but they sure as hell spent a lot of money - money that was no longer available for events.

But this isn’t the whole story either: ironically, given the unquantifiable nature of that early influencer marketing, three little letters dealt the death blow to big-budget events like SalonQP.

ROI. Return on investment. Floor space, depending on the size of the patch, sold for between £5,000 and £30,000 at SalonQP, but once a brand had staffed its stand, flown in watches and props, paid extra to hire TVs² and display cases, sorted out whatever other visual merchandising they needed and in some cases, created something special to really catch the eye - Tudor encasing a North Flag in a block of ice, perhaps, or simply deciding to spend thousands on a raised wooden floor that would trip everyone up - a brand’s expenditure could be far north of that. So to make sense of the whole adventure, it would need to sell a few watches, and here’s the real problem: in nearly all cases, they weren’t selling anything at all.

Not to say exhibitors didn’t do good business - many did, one way or another. But they couldn’t actually take payment there and then; to begin with, this was because we couldn’t, or didn’t have POS³ machines available. Then when we did, they didn’t always work because the Saatchi Gallery has very thick stone walls and pretty bad wifi; also, a lot of brands didn’t want the appearance of actually conducting a transaction in circumstances that they saw as unworthy of their ‘brand experience’, i.e. they couldn’t sit the customer down in a quiet room, open some champagne and make them feel special/awkward (delete as appropriate). I mean, there was plenty of champagne, but I sort of saw the point: SalonQP was a bit of a scrum, when most potential customers were there, and it’s not very luxury to suddenly whip out a card reader in front of everyone. More to the point, brands ran into organisational obstacles; often we hosted watchmakers with a UK distributor who had exclusive rights to their sales in this country, so they couldn’t make a sale outside of that relationship. Or, a brand with a boutique would say ‘if you want to buy this watch, that you’re holding right now and is very much for sale, we can put one aside for you in the boutique if you come in on Monday’, to which the customer would say ‘but I’m here now… willing to pay for it’. Because they want the sales to go through the boutique, otherwise it’ll look like they’re paying sales staff and security guards to stand still all day and do nothing⁴. Brands would take customers’ details, but that’s not the same as actually selling a watch - something you like the look of after four glasses of champagne, egged on by your mates, isn’t something you’re always going to go through with when you’re at home three days later. At an event like British Watchmakers’ Day, or WatchPro Salon, host to mostly smaller, less pretentious brands, there isn’t the same aversion to doing honest business out in the open, and times have changed to the extent that it’s expected. Brands will actually make limited editions specifically to sell at the event; I think in all my years at SalonQP I only remember this happening once. It was a special edition of Montblanc’s Orbis Terrarum worldtimer with a Union Jack design underneath the stencilled world map⁵, presented by Davide Cerrato, and I think they made a grand total of five watches. I honestly can’t remember if they sold them all.

Plenty of other things have happened in the five years since ClubQP, a smaller-scale version of the same basic idea that saw us attempt to use a less expensive venue and lean into the trend towards smaller, more focussed events. Barely a month after it happened, Hearst (which had bought QP from the Telegraph mainly on the strength of its events portfolio) closed down the magazine altogether having realised that both magazine and event were really very difficult to run profitably. If only they’d spoken to the people who actually worked on them, rather than the smooth sales executives at TMG. But that’s another story…

In the last five years we’ve had Brexit, making it substantially harder to import and sell anything in the UK, not to mention the loss of the tax-reclaim scheme for tourists, meaning that it’s far more sensible to go watch shopping in continental Europe or, frankly, anywhere else in the world. Watch-related crime in London has spiked, and it’s not alone in this as a city, but it’s hard to champion the idea of a SalonQP-sized event without thinking that disgorging thousands of boozed-up watch collectors onto the King’s Road is just asking for trouble. The hospitality sector has been particularly badly hit by Brexit and the pandemic together, so hosting events in the UK is now even more expensive than it was, and as I think I’ve touched on once or twice, it was bloody expensive.

Queues for SalonQP

We’ve seen micro-events thrive; we’ve seen Redbar rise and, if not fall, then certainly become a bit more background. We’ve witnessed the birth of super-geek events like Rolliefest, and brand-sponsored collector summits. The appetite is there for community-led events, where it feels like industry types aren’t the only ones who matter. Perhaps as a reaction to the stuffy, overly lavish events hosted by top brands, consumers have shown that they’re very happy to come to more modest get-togethers if the content is right; there are now several smaller-scale watch events around the country, in Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and so on. There’s a really random one that’s run out of a hotel near Heathrow which I personally think looks awful but it seems to be working. None of them is particularly glamorous but maybe that’s ok.

Retail, though, is the key ingredient. It’s no coincidence that everyone’s favourite watch event - Dubai Watch Week - is organised by Seddiqi, a retailer. That’s how they get the biggest brands to turn up and take part. It brings a recognised name to the table, with a huge mailing list and international prestige (for all that I respect WatchPro as a magazine, it is still held back by being a B2B publication that plenty of people outside of the industry will never have heard of). WatchTime, in New York, is produced in partnership with Wempe. I Am Watch, the latest debutant on the scene, is run by The Hour Glass. Within Switzerland, it’s a little different: the watch industry can get the entire city, or canton, of Geneva behind an event like Geneva Watch Days - there is an institutionalised support of watchmaking that’s embedded in the culture that comes to the fore at times like this. London isn’t going to care - politically or culturally - about expensive trinkets for the super-rich, so you need a backer with clout.

Bringing in a retailer would not be a magic bullet. It would be very surprising if said retailer consented to have brands at the event that they didn’t stock. So there would be limitations. But it would open the door to the world’s biggest watch brands once more taking an interest in a London-based event without incurring enormous costs and with the potential to make money there and then. WatchPro, or whoever, could even have a split-level structure: the Prestige Fair, In Association With Watches Of Switzerland, could co-exist with the Independent Plaza, if you managed it right. The question of ROI still rears its head, though: one wonders whether DWW or I Am Watch is a loss-leader for their backers, aimed at building their prestige and credibility just as they might produce editorial content on other channels. If anyone feels like enlightening me on that, do get in touch. In the meantime… enjoy the show?

ps. The domain name and social accounts for London Watch Week were, my friend said, already taken. So maybe someone, somewhere, has a plan…

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Quick Links

1. Why Staid Swiss Watchmakers Are Embracing a YouTube Loudmouth, at Bloomberg
   
   There is a knowing tone to Bloomberg’s coverage here, and I also enjoyed the quote from Hublot CEO Julien Tornare at the end, where he not so subtly implied that Nico is talking out of his… porthole. But the whole thing does make me despair a little. Brands like AP are taking a calculated risk associating themselves with his particular style. I’m all for honesty in the media but what Nico does isn’t radical honesty, it’s a carefully calculated blend of provocation, sensationalism, crude clickbait and innuendo. It’s algorithm-friendly, which gives him the kind of numbers brands crave, but there has to be a middle ground, tonally, between what he does and dull, slavish sycophancy.

2. Watch Execs Need to Learn to Respect Journalistic Boundaries: An Open Letter, at Robb Report
   
   All I can say to this is bravo. It could go further still, but the point is made and it’s extremely heartening to see it on a major mainstream magazine.

3. Channeling Science In The Wild Pacific, at Hodinkee
   
   It’s not really much to do with watches, other than being facilitated by Blancpain, but few people can put you in the shoes (flippers?) of a diver like Jason Heaton, and I always appreciate a dose of real-world context with my dive watch knowledge.

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And Finally…

There is a new Universal Geneve website. What can it tell us about Breitling’s plans for the brand, which is not set to reveal new watches until 2026? Well, not much. Some of the links - including one, intriguingly, for a ‘magazine’ section - weren’t working at the time of writing. SJX reports that Gregory Bruttin has been hired from Roger Dubuis to oversee the brand, under Georges Kern. Hopefully the way Roger Dubuis handled the brand’s heritage and history under Richemont is not providing the template for Universal’s strategy. I think the most interesting detail is the inclusion of the Cabriolet in the list of ‘Icons’ under the UG name. It’s easily the least well-known of the models referenced (Polerouter, Compax and Tri-Compax being the others) and would hint that Breitling plans to have at least one dress watch line to the revival. This would tally with reported plans for UG to sit above Breitling in the hierarchy, and potentially will help establish a brand identity that sits apart from Breitling; initial questions when the revival was announced were around how two makers of sporty chronographs were going to sit comfortably under the same roof. For now, though, this is a mere appetiser. One more detail from the press release caught my eye: the fact that a panel of experts, collectors, journalists and dealers was assembled for its input on the website and other matters. It’s the first time in my memory that a brand has so openly talked of crowd-sourcing this kind of relaunch; hopefully it results in crowd-pleasing results rather than watches that appear to have been designed by committee.

Top marks to Hodinkee for being extremely clear about the nature of Christopher Ward’s guilloché dials - and I suppose, top marks to Christopher Ward for being open about it in the first place. The campaign for accurate terminology gathers pace…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

Chris

1. Fuck off, UTC ;-)

2. One of the many crazy, crazy things about running an events business is that you can hire out a television for a few days for more money than it actually cost in the first place

3. Point of sale

4. A walk down Bond St will reveal this to be true regardless

5. Tiny bit ‘British Empire’ vibes