This post is a companion to the 3DLANES podcast episode.
I was walking around Windup SF and something happened. It was not about a watch I wanted to buy, not about a brand I hadn’t seen before. It was more of a personal and “business” thought. A “wait, how does any of this make sense?” kind of thought.
So let’s get into it.
The Multiplication Problem
Count the shows. Not in your head, actually count them.
Watches and Wonders. Chronopolis. Time to Watches. Windup in New York, SF, Chicago, and Dallas. The Collective’s Open House. Intersect in LA, Austin, Charlotte, and New York. Dubai Watch Week. District Time. Timepiece shows in Toronto and Vancouver.
That’s a lot of events for a niche industry. And that list isn’t exhaustive.
Now ask yourself: if you’re a small watch brand, what does attending even one of these look like? You have the booth, or table. Travel. Hotels. Logistics to bring inventory, because three or four years ago at Windup people complained that brands weren’t selling watches on the floor, so now you bring inventory. What sells, what doesn’t, what you carry home. Staff time, which for a team of four or five people is not a small variable. Do you hire someone local and sacrifice the brand representation, or do you fly your own people out?
That’s before you’ve sold a single watch.
The Old World vs. The Current One
There was a time when the logic was simple. One show ran everything, Baselworld. If your name was worth anything, you were there. It was a gatekeeper in the truest sense. Every brand, every retailer, every media outlet converged in one place. The show was the industry for one week a year.
Think of it like a plate. Someone dropped it. Now you have big fragments and small fragments scattered across the calendar and the map.
The shows are no longer mandatory. Before, they were retailer-facing, order-driven, industry gatekeepers. Now brands sell direct. Media is decentralized, YouTube, Instagram, Substack, anybody can put content out. Watch launches don’t depend on a show anymore. Omega releases when Omega feels like it. Nodus doesn’t even show up to Windup anymore because they have Intersect, and Intersect alone gives them four cities.
That’s a rational decision, by the way. It’s not abandonment. It’s math.
The ROI Question Nobody Wants to Answer Out Loud
“Why spend $50K on a booth when I can launch directly to my audience?”
That’s the question every brand might asking right now, even if they’re not saying it at the table. The answer depends on the tier.
Tier 1 – Visibility and Prestige: Watches and Wonders Geneva. Expensive, but it signals something. It tells the market that you made it. For brands that can afford it and need that legitimacy signal, it makes sense.
Tier 2 – Community and Sales: Windup, Intersect. This is where you can actually sell watches, build relationships with enthusiasts, and get face time with the people who matter to your growth. The return is more tangible.
Tier 3 – Experimental and Regional: Smaller shows, regional fairs. Often skipped unless there’s a specific strategic reason to be there. The Canadian shows are probably transitioning toward Tier 2 territory, but they’re not there yet for most brands.
The problem is that brands don’t get to pick just one tier. If you want full coverage, you’re spread across all of them, and the math stops working. Fortis was at Windup for the past two years. This year… gone. You notice things like that when you’re walking the floor.
What Shows Are Actually Competing Against
This is the part that gets missed. Watch shows are not competing against each other. That’s too narrow of a view.
They’re competing against Instagram drops. YouTube coverage that reaches more collectors than any single show floor. Direct collector dinners. Retail partnerships. Owned events. A well-executed newsletter. A brand that knows its audience and can reach them without buying a plane ticket.
The budgets for attending shows have not multiplied the same way the shows have. Personnel hasn’t scaled either. So, brands do what any rational operator does, they narrow their focus, build the channels they own, and skip the rest.
The real question on the table is not “which shows do we attend?” It’s “should we attend shows at all, or do we deploy this budget somewhere that actually moves the needle?”
What’s Still Worth Something
Here’s where I land on this, personally.
I was at Windup SF. I talked to Jason from Complecto, Markus from Formex, the guys from 49 Crowns, Aaron Cooper, who is a massive name in sneakers and was getting a feel for the watch world. I had conversations worth having. I was not, if I’m honest with myself, in a mode of trying everything and buying something. That’s not where my head was.
What I appreciate most at this point is the community. The people, the conversations, the connections that don’t happen on a comment thread. That has real value, and I don’t think it’s lost.
But for brands, the community argument has to compete against a spreadsheet. And right now, too many shows are asking for too much with too little guaranteed in return.
One more thing. I posted some photos from a pregame of the show on Reddit and someone commented that a particular brand should be selling their watches at $700 instead of $3,000. That brand, at $700, would not exist. I don’t know their exact cost structure, but I do know that a comment like that comes from not understanding what it takes to keep a watch brand alive, the development, the tooling, the finishing, the show costs, the team. This is the other conversation worth having. Not just which shows brands should attend, but what it actually costs for a brand to be a brand. The more people understand that, the better this whole thing works.
The trade show pie has been sliced. It doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. Brands are going to focus on one or two events max, build what they own, and skip the rest. That’s not a retreat, it’s just business.
Thank you for stopping by,
DL
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