Watches & Wonders: Observations from My First Big Trade Show

Watches & Wonders 2022 is history. We spent a week in Geneva covering the show, and it was quite a whirlwind. I’ve been anticipating this for a long time: I was scheduled to travel to Basel in 2020 for what would have been my first European trade show, but the chaos that ensued that Spring kept that from happening. For a time, it wasn’t clear if this show would happen, with Covid-19 still very much a concern and the international nature of an event like this, part of me refused to believe with certainty that I’d really be heading to Switzerland until I was very nearly at Logan International with boarding pass in hand and luggage checked. 

Naturally, and as you’d expect, our coverage of the event was very focused on watches. It’s a watch blog, after all. But I think there’s some pulling back of the curtain that is worth exploring, and might be interesting to some, and since it was my first time at an event like this and it was all so new to me, I wanted to take the opportunity to get some of this down in writing for posterity. So, some observations. 

Nobody Can Prepare You for the Size and Scale of Palexpo

When I first started reading watch blogs and would get to coverage of events like Baselworld and SIHH, I’d often see writers like myself describing these enormous booths that brands set up to showcase their watches. “They’re as big as a house!” I’d often hear. Well, yes, they are. But what makes these booths so impressive isn’t just their size, but where they’re situated. Palexpo, the cavernous convention center where Watches & Wonders takes place, is one of the largest buildings I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time in. It’s 100,000 square meters of floor space with towering ceilings that watch brands take full advantage of to create booths that have a verticality to them that I wasn’t quite ready for. It’s a headspinningly large space, and you get your steps in, as they say, when walking the hall. If you have back to back meetings scheduled with brands on opposite ends of Palexpo, you’re going to be late to meeting number two. When Blake and I did a leisurely walk-through of just about half the hall for Instagram, the video went on for 20 minutes. 

And yet, at times, it feels surprisingly intimate. When  you meet with a brand, you’re ushered into a small room within one of those huge booths, and it’s just you and a handful of other writers and a representative or two from the brand, and you kind of forget about the commotion going on all around you on the other side of those doors. It’s a strange experience to be thrown from the controlled chaos of the hall itself to the oftentimes highly regimented brand presentations, and then back again, but as the week presses on a rhythm gradually develops and you get used to it. The many rooms within the sometimes extremely complex booths only exacerbate the casino like quality of Palexpo – it’s a labyrinth with no natural light, and if it weren’t for the fact that it was a, you know, watch event, time within the hall would truly have no meaning. 

Seeing Watches in Person is Essential 

We know this, we say it often, but an event like Watches & Wonders really drives the point home that in order to properly evaluate a watch, it has to be done with it actually on your wrist. Casting judgment through social media is absolutely futile. It reveals inherent flaws, perhaps unavoidable, in the way new watches are reported to the larger watch world in the first place. 

Watches & Wonders is basically the Super Bowl for the watch community, which means that armchair quarterbacks are out in force, ready with hot takes from thousands of miles away based on photos under suboptimal conditions, for the most part. On the show floor, an experience that’s fairly common is that we are presented watches, we like them after trying them on all too briefly, and then once our photos and thoughts are posted publicly, the watches are dismissed with a chorus of “too big,” “too thick,” “too expensive,” and so on. This happens everyday, of course, but it’s quite striking to observe it at such a large scale when the entire internet watch community is engaged. It makes me wonder if I have been too quick to judge a watch based on early photos in the past, before I did this for a living, and what I might have missed out on. 

Because the fact is, a lot of these watches that on paper might seem “too big” are actually perfectly fine. If they are beyond your own size preferences, that’s one thing, but brands like IWC make watches for the entire world, and based on anecdotal evidence that their newest novelties are already an extremely tough ticket, they would seem to have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing and who their customer is. Same goes for Hublot, TAG Heuer, Tudor, and the rest, all brands with watches that were objectively very well executed at Watches & Wonders, but met with harsh critiques from watch fans viewing the new pieces in two dimensions, on a cell phone screen. 

The best example of this phenomenon from the show is without a doubt the experience of the new Tudor Black Bay Pro. As some readers know, I’m not a fan of watches that are overly chunky, and have made buying mistakes in the past by not properly accounting for how thick a watch actually wears from day to day. When I tried on the nearly 15mm tall BB Pro, I didn’t for a moment have a thought that this watch was too thick. It felt incredibly well proportioned on my wrist, looked good, and impressed me immediately. When I asked the Tudor rep presenting the watches about the thickness measurement, I thought for sure he had made a mistake, or perhaps something was lost in translation when he told me the actual measurement. This was my first meeting at Watches & Wonders, and was an important reminder for the rest of the show to not put too much stock in specs, but to simply try the watches on and meet them on their own terms. 

Geneva is Beautiful – I Wish I Had Seen It 

Because Palexpo is situated outside the city center, and you spend so much time there for the show, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to casually explore the city of Geneva. As a team, we had a single day in the absolutely amazing Old Town (it’s really old – Urwerk’s building, where we had a great meeting on a bright Sunday morning, has been standing for eight centuries). I’m not complaining – we were there to work, after all. But for better or worse, most of what we saw at the show was the show itself. Talking with other members of the press, it seems like seeing not much more than the inside of Palexpo and your own hotel is a fairly common theme.

That said, there were breathtaking moments where you get a chance to take in some of the history and inspiration of the city almost by accident. The view from an Uber or a shuttle, for instance, can momentarily catch you off guard. Geneva is situated at the southern tip of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) and surrounded on either side by the Alps and Jura Mountains. I’m not unfamiliar with mountains – I live in the White Mountain state and we’re very proud here of our hiking and skiing. But seeing these enormous peaks looming over a major metropolitan area is a very different thing than experiencing mountains when you’re just about in the middle of nowhere in northern New England. 

The Sandwiches

I’ve posted about the Palexpo sandwiches on Instagram and mentioned them on the podcast, but it’s time to do a slightly deeper dive into one of the most curious little oddities about the Watches & Wonders experience that I haven’t heard discussed nearly enough. 

The Palexpo has two main press lounges where you wind up spending a considerable amount of time if you’re at the show to create content. Each lounge is fully staffed with helpful servers who will constantly bring you just about anything you need. Endless espresso, juice, soft drinks, and small pastries await. Around midday, they start bringing out little sandwiches. Cheese, chicken, tomato and basil, and various similar combinations are offered. Also tuna and salmon, which both felt, at times, like rare treats, relatively unseen compared to the more common cheese selections. 

I love a good sandwich. And if I’m being completely honest, I even love a bad sandwich. Mostly I love having food brought to me in a situation where I’m helplessly ill equipped to get it myself (leaving Palexpo for a restaurant and coming back is ill advised due to traffic and the distance you’d need to cover). For the first several days of Watches & Wonders, I genuinely looked forward to that point in the day when the sandwiches would start, and we even strategized which press lounge to work out of at times based on a perception that the sandwiches were “better” at one over the other, a notion that in hindsight seems patently absurd. 

Well, I don’t need to tell you that by the end of Watches & Wonders, even I, a sandwich enthusiast through and through, had no desire to eat meat or dairy between pieces of bread ever again. By the final days of the show, the sandwiches weren’t even being served in their usual fashion, but were presented still in their sealed plastic wrappers, revealing them as the airline quality food we knew deep down they always were. Nothing says “I think we’re ready to head home, now” more clearly than vacuum sealed sandwiches. 

The Burger King double cheeseburger with a piece of fried halloumi thrown on top, however, is another story entirely, and something I can’t wait to experience again in a year’s time. 

It Made a Lot of Sense for Us to Be There 

Coming into the show, I wasn’t entirely sure how Worn & Wound would be received. Watches & Wonders as it exists today has its roots in the SIHH show, a fair for the high-end brands of the Richemont group, and not an event that Worn & Wound ever covered in person. Watches & Wonders is a different thing, and Worn & Wound has certainly changed and expanded our reach, but I didn’t know how readers would respond to coverage of brands like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin in these pages. 

I came away from my week in Switzerland with a few thoughts on this perfectly crystallized. First and foremost, you just have to be there to cover the show. As I said earlier, it’s the Super Bowl, and everyone covers the Super Bowl. It would be disingenuous for a watch related website to ignore the biggest watch event of the year, regardless of what that website’s specialty is within the larger context of watches as an enthusiast pursuit. 

Secondly, and I think this is the most important lesson I learned, is that in spite of the high end nature of many of the watches we saw and the corresponding price points they sit at, Watches & Wonders is all about celebrating watches and the watch industry as a positive force, regardless of price. Every brand at the show is putting their best work forward, and it’s much less about figuring out if you want to actually own something than it is about having the opportunity to experience the best firsthand. I find it very hard to be cynical about that, particularly when everyone around you is similarly excited just to be in the presence of so much cool stuff. Going from one booth to another, and another, feels like a never ending game of “Can You Top This.” It’s simply so much fun, and I’d like to think it is of interest to anyone who considers watches a primary hobby. There are a lot of watches that you see during the week that remind you why you love the hobby so much to begin with.