PARALLÈLE / GENEVA WATCH DAYS 2026
GENEVA NOTES · 02
Around the Table
At some point, after enough presentations, you stop watching the watches. You start watching what people do with them.
A watch moves towards the window. Another is turned over, then back again. Someone reaches for a loupe. Someone else asks to see the same dial for a second time. Around the tables in Geneva, these small gestures often said more than the first reaction.
Geneva Watch Days was busier this year. More brands, more appointments, more people moving from one part of the city to another. But somehow, it still left room to stay at the table. Perhaps that is what distinguishes it.
There is intensity, certainly, but less of the pressure that surrounds some of the industry’s larger gatherings. Conversations have space to wander. Appointments run over. Familiar faces appear between meetings. And sometimes, the most interesting part begins once the presentation is technically finished.
THE INSTINCT TO LOOK CLOSER
With Artisans de Genève, it often began with a pair of gloves. The watches on the table were not novelties waiting to be sold. Artisans de Genève does not produce watches; it works closely with clients to personalize watches they already own, transforming them through a process shaped around each client’s ideas and wishes.
Not a new watch. A personal one.
Once that was understood, the questions changed. What was the inspiration behind the personalization? What did the client want to achieve? How was this done? Skeletonized movements were examined. Gem-setting drew people closer. Hand-finished details revealed themselves one after another. And, repeatedly, a version of the same reaction: I didn’t expect to see this.
Perhaps because personalization can sound deceptively simple until the object is in front of you. At Artisans de Genève, the process can take eight to ten months, with the client deeply involved throughout. What sits on the table is therefore not simply a personalized watch, but the result of months of conversations and decisions between the client and the atelier.
With Minase, people moved. Quite literally. Watches were picked up and carried towards the window, where Geneva’s natural light could do what press images and hotel lighting cannot.
The Yusai dials shifted in tone. Pigments created by a Japanese artist from materials including soil and flowers revealed nuances that seemed to change with every angle. Urushi lacquer, tree sap and gold leaf invited the same instinct: turn the watch, move it towards the light, look again.
Then came the loupe. And often, eventually: Can I see that one again? There was another change around the Minase table this year, too. More people arrived already knowing the name. Some knew which model they wanted to see. Others came looking for particular dials or techniques. For a brand that, only a few years ago, was largely unfamiliar outside specialist circles, that recognition felt significant. Discovery was still happening. It was simply starting from somewhere further along.
And then there was Schwarz Etienne. Here, the choreography was consistent. First, the dial. Black and gold. Immediate. Graphic. Then the watch turned over. And stayed there.
The six-bridge, pocket-watch-inspired architecture and gold micro-rotor of the 1902 Petite Seconde Heure Dorée changed the conversation. Watches went from dial to movement and back again as people tried to decide which side deserved their attention.
One comment captured it particularly well: The movement should be the dial. The dial brought people in. The movement made them stay.
The dial brought people in. The movement made them stay.
THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN WATCHES
But not everything around the table was about watches.
Emily from The Secret Diary of a Watch Girl arrived without a scheduled appointment. We found a way to sit down, and what began as her first encounter with Artisans de Genève became a twenty-minute conversation that moved from a Spike Lee watch to New York, Brooklyn and the cultural world around it. The watch opened the conversation. The conversation went somewhere else.
There were reunions, too. Beth Doerr brought the humor she always does, while Thomas Brechtel brought his eye for photography and generously turned the camera on us for a moment. There was also time to reconnect with Wei Koh and exchange thoughts on the industry and the brands we represent.
Emily, The Secret Diary of a Watch Girl
Beth Doerr
Jason Gong
Łukasz Doscocz
And then there were the encounters that happened without any plan at all. Running into Danar Widanarto, known as Chronondo, became a conversation about his concierge world, our experiences with unconventional brands, and plenty of laughter in between. No formal appointment, no photograph to document it. Just the kind of spontaneous exchange that reminds you why being in the same place still matters. With some people, the watches eventually become secondary. You catch up. You laugh. You talk about life. That, too, is part of watch week.
AFTER ENOUGH PRESENTATIONS
Present the same watch often enough and something changes. The first presentations begin with the selling points. Then the script loosens.
You learn who wants to understand the mechanics first. Who responds to design. Who wants the story behind the craft. Who already knows the brand well enough that the formal presentation can last five minutes and the rest of the appointment can become something else entirely.
There is no perfect sentence that makes someone stop. Our role is to give context. To notice what matters to the person sitting opposite us. To make the story accessible and then, perhaps, know when to get out of its way. Because eventually the object has to do the rest.
The watches carry the emotion. But around the tables in Geneva, they also do something else: they give us a reason to sit down. Sometimes the conversation lasts ten minutes. Sometimes twenty. Sometimes it continues over a drink, at another event, or months later in another city.
The watch may be what brings us to the table. What happens around it is often what builds the relationship.