An Olympic gold medalist, an ice cream truck, and four blocks of shops allowed to sell you something.
Upstairs at a jeweler on Hyman Avenue, somebody handed you a watch that weighed 82 grams, which is to say weightless on your wrist. It was a NORQAIN Independence Skeleton Titanium DLC that nobody outside the company had handled until that morning: grade 5 titanium, an openworked COSC-certified automatic, CHF 4,500 or about $5,550. You could hand it back and later be standing in a different watchmaker minutes later.
Watch Week Aspen closed its third edition on August 16th after four days downtown. Organizers counted 40 events, 19 brand and retail partners, more than 300 attendees, and most of it free to attend with amazing mountain scenery in the background.
The Difference Was the Cash Register
Nine retailers and three event venues, numbered across a few blocks of downtown Aspen. Oliver Smith Jeweler alone hosted seven brands.
Nothing is sold at a watch stand at Watches and Wonders, and Dubai Watch Week is proudly non-commercial, even though the retailer Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons created it. Geneva’s boutiques stay open through fair week for the In the City program, and a luxury mall lines up the same names year-round, but each of those is one brand’s room: one catalog, one price, one waitlist.
Aspen lined up watch reseller businesses to exhibit bringing their best selections to the festival.. Oliver Smith Jeweler co-founded the week and hosted the NORQAIN debut from the historic Tom Thumb building, its Aspen outpost since the Scottsdale original opened in 1981. M.S. Rau brought rare complications up from New Orleans.
Several watch resellers were also within a four block radius including Meridian Jewelers with IWC Schaffhausen, the Swiss house an American founded in 1868, with the A. Lange & Söhne boutique a few doors down. Lange’s Lumen dials pass ultraviolet through to charge the lume hiding beneath, exactly the sort of thing you need to see in person.
The United States is one of the largest Swiss watch export destinations with over 17% of Swiss watch exports being sold in the US and with growing wealth of Americans that there are more consumers for Swiss and high end watches in the coming years.
The Brand President Was Out of Breath
Alex Ferreira brought his Olympic medals to the NORQAIN 3K, left. Gerald Charles finished its three-day collector lounge on the courts, right.
Friday morning, NORQAIN sent collectors three kilometers through town behind U.S. Brand President Emmanuel Bütler. Three kilometers is nothing until you run it at nearly 8,000 feet. Alongside them was Alex Ferreira, the Aspen native who took Olympic halfpipe Gold in February. To celebrate the experience an ice cream truck turned up afterward which is a great way to embrace the experience.
Gerald Charles pushed the idea further. The house Gérald Genta founded in 2000 kept a collector lounge at Oliver Smith Jeweler for three days, then walked everyone to the courts for tennis and pickleball. Watches came off wrists and went into bags. You learn a lot about a piece by watching its owner decide whether to keep it on.
The principals were just as easy to reach. Christine Hutter, who revived the sleeping 19th-century Glashütte name Moritz Grossmann in 2008, gave an afternoon to German watchmaking. Hugo Lesizza poured wine and presented L. Leroy, the Paris house of 1785 that Festina Group brought back with production in Geneva.
The Table With No Waitlist
M.S. Rau ran a four-part series on rare complications and vintage pieces, shown among the gallery’s paintings.
Saturday brought VintageFest, where Analog:Shift set up inside Betteridge and invited collectors to bring their own pieces. That table ran on different rules from the new-watch counter, where buyers can spend years on a waiting list for the chance to hand over money. Condition and paperwork set the price instead, and no brand controlled what walked in on somebody’s wrist.
The pairing is cosier than it looks: the Watches of Switzerland Group owns both, having bought Analog: Shift in 2020 and Betteridge’s Aspen boutique a year later.
Oliver Smith Jeweler also runs the OMEGA boutique in the same building. Single-brand boutiques like it keep opening across the country, each one a beautiful place to be shown exactly one point of view. The four-minute walk only works while there is somewhere else to walk to.
All images courtesy of Watch Week Aspen.
