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The Watch Collectors Building a New Kind of Fair

Following collector-focused fairs established in New York and Dubai, two new events in Miami and Las Vegas promise performances, workshops and evening gatherings alongside the usual booths. Founders Lex Borrero and Faheem Khan explain the trade-offs that will go into making the experience feel personal.

At a watch fair, the detail that stays with you may be something the catalog never thought to mention: the problem a watchmaker couldn’t leave alone or the detour that brought a collector to a particular timepiece. Those conversations give a room full of objects a reason to hold your attention, yet finding them can be a matter of standing at the right booth when the right person begins to talk. Once the doors close, even the people you connected with can disappear into separate dinner reservations.

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The collectors behind two new festivals in Miami and Las Vegas are trying to make those encounters easier to find, borrowing the rhythm of the music industry to put makers onstage and give audiences somewhere to reconvene after dark. Music executive Lex Borrero’s Time to Drive runs Nov. 6-8 at Mana Wynwood Convention Center. The Escapement, co-founded by watch collector and Screw Down Crown editor-in-chief Faheem Khan, follows on Feb. 5-7, 2027, with its weekend exhibition at T-Mobile Arena, home to the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights.

The appetite for a watch fair built around the visitor is older than either festival. WatchTime was already running its annual InsideBasel.Geneva (IBG) collector events when WatchTime New York debuted in 2015; that year, Worn & Wound opened its free Windup fair with 19 brands in a SoHo storefront. Dubai Watch Week also began in 2015, after the Seddiqi retail family’s 2014 exhibition of contenders for Geneva’s prestigious watchmaking awards had prompted visitors to ask about the people behind the watches. Panels and workshops gave those questions a home. Even Watches and Wonders, Geneva’s major industry gathering, enlisted the Montreux Jazz Festival to program public evenings this year. Miami and Las Vegas are extending an idea those events helped establish: a watch fair can be worth attending for what happens away from the display case.

Borrero had an audience long before he began assembling........

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