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.
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 collectors, through NEON16, the entertainment company he co-founded with Puerto Rican producer Tainy to work across recorded music and live events. His father raced rally cars, and the Formula One afternoons of his childhood in Colombia played out with Latin American radio commentary alongside the television. When we spoke, he was finding his way into a hotel in Stuttgart at the end of a collector trip.
Getting there had meant making room for something outside his career. “I had no hobbies, I had no life,” he tells Observer of the period before sharing his watches drew him into collecting circles. Moving between car clubs and watch clubs, he found people with similar appetites for craftsmanship who were nevertheless wary of venturing into one another’s expertise. “They spoke two very different languages,” he says. Being comfortable around a complicated watch did not necessarily make it easier to ask a basic question about a car.
On European collector trips, he began mixing the groups, borrowing the close quarters and hectic schedules he knew from touring to give strangers reasons to spend time together. “Can I create that same environment in a luxury space?” was the question he began considering. He describes one watch collector on his latest trip who rarely drove his cars, yet spent three days driving a Mercedes and began considering the restoration of a G-Wagen that had sat in his garage for years.
The festival will have to create that ease among strangers who have not spent several days traveling together, which helps explain why Borrero describes the exhibition floor like a set: 28-foot walls with Ocean Drive-style facades, neon and live bands around watch booths arranged like a plaza. Nearby, the event advertises a tribute to Germany’s Nürburgring racetrack and displays devoted to Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. “No matter what you collect, you’re welcome here,” is how he describes the intended mix.
Perri Dash, head of curation at multi-vertical luxury lifestyle house 0260 and Borrero’s co-founder, wants small independent brands to share the floor with houses practicing haute horlogerie, or high-end watchmaking. “We put microbrands on the same floor as the most celebrated haute horlogerie houses, with no hierarchy and no separation by price point,” he tells Observer. He hopes the layout will encourage visitors to try unfamiliar watches and speak to their makers: “A newcomer can go from a microbrand to a haute horlogerie house in a few steps and discover what they actually love.”
To give those smaller exhibitors a chance to do more than set their watches on a table, Borrero says he priced space to leave money for the display itself. He did not provide a fee schedule, so the extent of that saving is unclear, but the decision reflects the instruction he gives his creative team: “Paint the canvas and frame it later.” Sponsorship and partnerships, he argues, can make an idea feasible after the team has imagined the experience it wants.
For Faheem Khan, getting collectors into an impressive room does not guarantee they will find the people worth hearing. At an earlier Dubai Watch Week, he missed a talk by Irish watchmaker Stephen McDonnell on creating MB&F’s LM Perpetual, a 581-component mechanical watch that accounts for uneven months and leap years. “I was there that day but had no idea the talk was happening,” Khan tells Observer; he discovered it afterward on YouTube. At The Escapement, the main stage is meant to bring those stories to the whole room, before visitors seek out a maker at his booth.
His co-founder Neeshu Hajra, an event producer, wants that gathering to survive the end of the day. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call from Faheem or Anish inviting me to dinner, but I’m with four friends and they only have two seats available at their table,” he describes, referring to fellow founder Anish Bhatt, the creator of WatchAnish. Comedy and music give them somewhere to reconvene without finding a restaurant that can accommodate the expanded group. “We wanted to create evening experiences that all of us can enjoy together.”
They have had to work out how much of the day those visitors can share, too. Khan and Hajra considered a three-hour VIP-only block on Saturday, which would have kept general-admission guests outside until midday, before deciding to divide early access between both mornings. The published schedule gives VIPs a 90-minute head start each day. “It felt unfair to GA ticket holders who traveled to Las Vegas to be there,” Khan says of the longer wait, an acknowledgment that the ticket is only one part of what an out-of-town collector has paid to attend.
Once inside, visitors will find the stage at one end of the exhibition floor and brand booths throughout, allowing a public talk to lead into a more personal encounter. Khan teases that Romain Gauthier will be there to meet guests and let them handle his watches, while an artisan will guide visitors through an enameling workshop, with the finished piece fired and taken home. Places must be booked on-site because capacity is limited. “There are no additional charges for activations inside T-Mobile Arena and none of the activations are reserved exclusively for VIP guests,” Khan adds.
Making those experiences available without an extra charge leaves the team to decide which can work at the scale of an arena. Hajra projects roughly half the costs will be covered by ticket revenue, with sponsors and participating brands providing the rest. “The hardest decisions for me always involve tabling ideas that excite me as a collector, but aren’t practically feasible or financially viable at this scale,” he explains. One was a soundproof listening room for minute repeaters and sonneries, rare watches that chime the time, where collectors could hear mechanisms easily lost in the noise of an exhibition floor.
The team could bring in the watches, but transport, insurance, security and construction put the estimated cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, too much for a room that relatively few visitors could use at once. They put it aside for now, a practical limit to Borrero’s philosophy of finding the frame after painting the canvas.
The visitor’s budget puts its own limits on that ambition. The Escapement’s evening entertainment comes with All Access passes, while its Friday gathering at Wynn Las Vegas is reserved for VIP All Access holders. “The VIP area is meant to facilitate hospitality more than it is to facilitate experience,” Borrero says of his Miami plans, but the festival website labels several marquee sessions as add-ons, including the live automotive podcast Spike’s Car Radio and photographer Larry Chen’s master class. Someone choosing an event because a particular person will be there needs to know whether admission includes that encounter.
Neither festival has held its inaugural edition, so the promise of a larger audience sharing a more intimate experience awaits a real crowd. “My ideal outcome is for people to experience that kind of storytelling throughout the weekend,” Khan says. For the visitor who arrives alone, an early sign of success would be knowing whom to look for the next morning.