The details that stand out to you at a watch fair may be things you never thought to mention in a catalog: a problem that a watchmaker can’t ignore, or a collector who takes a detour to buy a particular timepiece. These conversations give a room full of items a reason to grab your attention, but finding them might just be a matter of standing in the right booth when the right person starts talking. Once the doors close, even the people you’re connected to may disappear into separate dinner reservations.
The collectors behind two new music festivals in Miami and Las Vegas are trying to make these encounters more discoverable, borrowing from the music industry’s beat, putting producers on stage and giving audiences places to regroup after dark. Time to Drive with music executive Lex Borrero will be held November 6-8 at the Mana Wynwood Convention Center. Co-founded by watch collector and Screw Down Crown editor-in-chief Faheem Khan, The Escapement will be followed by a weekend exhibition at T-Mobile Arena, home of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, from February 5-7, 2027.
The interest in visitor-focused watch shows is older than any single festival. When WatchTime New York debuted in 2015, WatchTime was already hosting its annual InsideBasel.Geneva (IBG) collectors event; that same year, Worn & Wound hosted a free Windup Expo at its SoHo store, featuring 19 brands. Dubai Watch Week also begins in 2015, after the Seddiqi retail family presented a contender for Geneva’s prestigious watchmaking award in 2014, prompting visitors to ask about the man behind the watch. Groups and workshops provide a home for these issues. Even Watches and Wonders, Geneva’s main industry gathering, invited the Montreux Jazz Festival to host this year’s public evening. Miami and Las Vegas are expanding on the idea these events were founded on: watch shows are worth attending because of what’s happening beyond the display cases.
Borrero already had an audience long before he started gathering collectors through NEON16, the entertainment company he co-founded with Puerto Rican producer Tini that focuses on recorded music and live events. His father competed in rallying, and his childhood Formula 1 afternoons in Colombia were accompanied by Latin American radio commentary and television broadcasts. When we spoke, he was returning from a collector’s trip and looking for his way to a hotel in Stuttgart.
Getting there means making room for things outside of his career. “I had no hobbies, I had no life,” he told the Observer of the period before sharing his watches launched him into the collecting community. Traveling between car and watch clubs, he discovered that people shared a similar interest in craftsmanship but were wary of venturing into each other’s expertise. “They speak two completely different languages,” he said. Being familiar with complicated watches doesn’t necessarily make it easier to ask basic questions about your car.
On collectors’ tours of Europe, he began mixing groups, using the close quarters and hectic schedules he learned on tour to give strangers a reason to spend time together. “Can I create the same environment in a luxury space?” This is the question he started to consider. He described one of his recent trips to a watch collector who rarely drives but spent three days behind the wheel of a Mercedes and began thinking about restoring a G-Wagen that had been sitting in his garage for years.
The festival has to feel at ease with strangers who haven’t traveled with them for days, which helps explain why Borrero describes the fairgrounds as a set: 28-foot-tall walls with an Ocean Drive-style facade, neon lights and live bands surrounding guard booths, arranged like a plaza. Nearby, the event promoted a homage to Germany’s Nürburgring racetrack and featured Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. “Whatever you collect, you’re welcome here,” he said of the anticipated mix.
Perri Dash, head of curatorial at multi-vertical luxury lifestyle brand 0260 and co-founder of Borrero, hopes that small independent brands will share their space with those involved in haute horlogerie or high-end watchmaking. “We put micro-brands on the same floor as the most famous haute horlogerie companies, without a hierarchy and without differentiation by price point,” he told the Observer. He hopes this layout will encourage visitors to try unfamiliar watches and talk to their manufacturers: “Newcomers can go from a small brand to a high-end watch store in just a few steps and discover what they really like.”
To give those smaller exhibitors a chance to do more than just put a watch on a table, Borrero said he priced the space to leave money for the display itself. He didn’t provide a fee schedule, so the extent of the savings is unclear, but the decision reflects the instructions he gave his creative team: “Paint the canvas first, then frame it.” He believes that sponsorships and partnerships can make ideas feasible after the team has imagined the desired experience.
For Faheem Khan, getting collectors into an impressive room is no guarantee they’ll find someone worth listening to. At an early Dubai Watch Week, he missed a talk by Irish watchmaker Stephen McDonnell about building MB&F’s LM Perpetual, a 581-part mechanical watch that can count uneven months and leap years. “I was there that day but had no idea this conversation was taking place,” Khan told the Observer; he later discovered it on YouTube. At The Escapement, the main stage aims to bring these stories across the room, where visitors then seek out the maker at his booth.
His co-founder, event producer Neeshu Hajra, hopes the gathering lasts until the end. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call from Faheem or Anish inviting me to dinner, but I was with four friends and there were only two seats at their table,” he describes, referring to WatchAnish founder and co-founder Anish Bhatt. Comedy and music gave them a place to reunite without having to find a restaurant that could accommodate the expanded group. “We want to create a nighttime experience that we can all enjoy together.”
They also had to figure out how much time of the day these visitors could share. Khan and Hajira considered setting up a three-hour VIP area on Saturday so general admission guests could stay out until noon, then decided to split the early admissions between the two mornings. The published schedule has VIP starts 90 minutes earlier each day. “It feels unfair to those ticket holders who are traveling to Las Vegas for the convention,” Khan said of the longer wait times, acknowledging that tickets are only part of what out-of-town collectors pay.
Once inside, visitors will find a stage at one end of the showroom and brand booths scattered throughout, turning public presentations into more personal encounters. Khan joked that Romain Gauthier would meet guests there and let them handle his watches, while an artisan would guide visitors through the enamel workshop to fire the finished products and take them home. Due to limited capacity, spots must be reserved on site. “There are no additional fees for activations within T-Mobile Arena, and no activations are reserved exclusively for VIP guests,” Khan added.
Offering these experiences at no additional cost requires the team to decide which experiences can work at the scale of the arena. Hajra expects about half of the cost to be covered by ticket sales, with the remainder coming from sponsors and participating brands. “For me, the most difficult decisions always involve coming up with ideas that excite me as a collector, but are not actually feasible or financially feasible at this scale,” he explains. One is a soundproofed listening room that houses the minute repeater and the self-sounding striker, a rare type of striking watch, where collectors can hear the sound of a mechanism that can easily be lost in the noise of the exhibition grounds.
The team can bring in watches, but shipping, insurance, security and construction costs are estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars, too high for a room that can be used by relatively few visitors at a time. They put it aside for the time being, a practical limitation on Borrero’s philosophy of finding a frame after painting on canvas.
A tourist’s budget has its own limits on its ambitions. Escapement’s evening entertainment requires an All Access pass, while its Friday party at the Wynn Las Vegas is reserved exclusively for VIP All Access holders. “The purpose of the VIP area is more to facilitate hospitality than to facilitate the experience,” Borrero said of his plans for Miami. But the festival website marks several large events as add-ons, including live car podcast Spike’s Car Radio and a masterclass with photographer Larry Chen. Someone who chooses an activity because a specific person will be there needs to know whether admission includes that encounter.
Neither festival has hosted an inaugural event, so the promise of a larger audience sharing a more intimate experience awaits a real audience. “My ideal outcome would be for people to experience this kind of storytelling throughout the weekend,” Khan said. For visitors arriving alone, an early sign of success is knowing who to ask for the next morning.
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