SDC Weekly 151; The Escapement; Chanel vs Breitling; Top of the K shape at Phillips New York
What is The Escapement? Why can Chanel fight Breitling over a name? How a $13.9m Journe at Phillips proves the K shape is real, Kierkegaard's regret machine, Split Seconds for absent parents and more!
🚨 Welcome back to SDC Weekly! The time has finally come, for me to talk in more detail about The Escapement! This event is first and foremost, a labour of love; conceived by horology nerds who had a dream to do something cool for the community… something we would personally love to attend… let’s get on with it!
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🚀 The Escapement
Ever since The Escapement was announced, I have been getting the same two questions, over and over, in DMs and comments and WhatsApp groups. The first is ‘what actually is this thing?’ and the second is ‘how is it different from Watches and Wonders or Dubai Watch Week?’
These are fair questions, and with tickets going live imminently, I figured I should answer them to the best of my ability - once - instead of typing slightly different versions of the same reply into a dozen DMs.
For the avoidance of doubt: I co-founded this event, and I’m also its head of content. So asking me whether The Escapement is worth attending is roughly like asking Aurel Bacs if his title lot is worth buying. I will do my best to be useful anyway, and you can calibrate accordingly.
Who is “we”, anyway?
I figured I should cover this because “a few collectors decided to throw an arena event” might set off alarm bells (as it would for me too).
The founding team is split by design - half are seasoned watch enthusiasts, and half people who build large events for a living. On the collector side you’ve got names some of you will know: Anish, Horology Ancienne, myself, and a couple of others. On the production side, we have legit heavyweight experience. The three event leads have something like 75+ years between them running large-format consumer events, which includes arena takeovers, 35,000-person music festivals, that scale of stuff.
The bit that makes our economics work, though, is that one of our co-founders, Petr, owns a fabrication house that has built stands for the watch industry for over a decade (IWC, Montblanc, Hermès, Piaget and others, at Watches and Wonders and Basel before that). The same team has built Greubel Forsey boutiques in SoHo and Ginza. Because the fabricator is part of the event rather than being a vendor hired by it, we get our production at ‘cost’, with no chain of markups (from fabricator to agency to organiser). That’s the reason a brand can participate in our event for a fraction of what the equivalent would cost at other shows, and it’s the reason we could afford to cap brands instead of cramming the floor to pay the bills.
My point is that you can rest assured, this isn’t a group of enthusiasts winging it.
Who are watch events for?
Let’s start with my favourite Munger quote: ‘Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.’ I think a useful exercise for understanding any event is to ask who pays for it, and who it needs to keep happy. Follow the money, and the experience will be self explanatory.
Watches and Wonders, for example, is a trade show. It exists so brands can present novelties to retailers and press, and the production budget (which is an eye-watering sum btw) is spent in service of that mission. Yes, they sell public tickets now, and the public days have grown, but when you attend as a collector, you are essentially a plus one in someone else’s show. The important meetings are happening behind frosted glass, the people you want to talk to are double-booked with Bucherer, and the whole machine would run exactly the same if you stayed at home. You can feel this when you’re there, in that It is mostly a B2B event that tolerates random collectors.
Dubai Watch Week is a different animal, and I genuinely love DWW; I’ve said publicly it’s the best ‘watch show’ in the world, and I stand by that description (for now, anyway!). You can touch the watches, talk to watchmakers, and it’s free! But it has two specific features worth noting... First, it’s run by a retailer, and a retailer’s incentives shape everything from which brands get prominence to how the floor is laid out. Mostly, this works out fine, but the curation logic is ultimately driven by commercial needs. Second, and this is the bigger one for you, it only happens every two years. This means that in the off-years, the collector community has... nothing. We are all dressed up with nowhere to go.
That particular gap is where The Escapement fits neatly. It is the same November weekend DWW occupied in 2025, fast-forwarded one year, and now in Abu Dhabi instead of Dubai.
So, what is it?
It’s a three-day event at Etihad Arena from 20-22 November 2026. Friday is for VIPs, media and industry. Saturday and Sunday are general admission with 10,000 tickets available across the weekend. We’ve also partnered with the city of Abu Dhabi and their various entities to really embed our event into their city’s events calendar (including their comedy festival, and their collectors’ week programming).
The brand list is capped at 50, even though the venue could physically hold more, so this was a deliberate choice and not a constraint; anyone who has trudged through a hall of 100+ exhibitors knows that past a certain point, more brands just means more noise and less of the stuff you do want to see. The brands we’ve curated run from accessible independents around 3-4K CHF all the way to pieces in the 300-400K range - Greubel Forsey, Biver, Rexhep Rexhepi, Daniel Roth, Gérald Genta, Czapek, Romain Gauthier, Ming, Simon Brette, Atelier Wen, Konstantin Chaykin, Louis Erard, Kollokium... you get the idea. These are brands we own, brands we have on order, brands we want to get to know better, or just brands which do cool things.
One more point people keep asking about... we have nothing to do with selling watches. We sell floor space and stage time to brands, and tickets to you, and that’s the entire business model. If we were taking a cut of watch sales, we’d be dealers running a dealer event, and the whole ‘for collectors, by collectors’ thing would be nonsense. How brands handle their own retail relationships in the region is none of our business.
The stage
This where I need to explain my own job… given I’ll be the one working with brands on this. The centrepiece of The Escapement is a stage - I mean an actual arena stage, anchoring the whole floor, with programming running across all three days. And the rule I’m enforcing as head of content is simple… there will be no brand representatives reading press releases you could read for yourself on Hodinkee.
A press release says the moonphase is accurate for 45 million years. It tells you the power reserve went from 60 to 72 hours. These are best described as ‘factoids’, and factoids are free; you can read them on your phone in bed. What you can’t get on your phone is the why. Why did anyone decide a 45-million-year moonphase was worth pursuing? What broke along the way? Who lost sleep over it? Those are stories, and stories are the entire reason any of us end up falling for particular watches. Nobody has ever justified a watch purchase solely with a spec sheet - people like us buy objects that mean something, and the meaning comes from the story attached to the object.
So yeah, that’s what the stage is for. Some brands will do grand keynotes, some will do something intimate and stripped back. Lang & Heyne, to give you a real example, wanted to launch a new watch for their 25th anniversary, and talk about what it took to create it, and the craftsmanship within it. We’re still working through the stage content so everything is still subject to change - but that’s the key difference with this event: we work with brands to create something we think will resonate with people like us.
We also have a separate stage which can keep folks entertained between brand segments. Here we will have things like fireside chats with collectors and panel discussions about hot topics like the hand finishing debate (btw, I’d welcome other suggestions). The panels will include and also be moderated by people from the community… and because we’re tied to no retailer and no publication, we can put whoever we want on that stage and discuss whatever we want. You’d be surprised how rare that is.
Nighttime
This is the part I’m perhaps most excited about, because it fixes my single biggest frustration with every watch event I’ve ever attended. The daytime experience at a good watch fair is fine, but the evenings are always fragmented. You’d typically have a hundred separate dinners and hotel-lobby gatherings scattered across a city, and you spend half your trip discovering the next morning that everyone you wanted to see was at the other thing. The community comes together for the day and then atomises every night, and nobody seems to question it.
So for our event, we kept everyone in the building. Each of the three nights, the arena will be transformed into an evening venue and the whole community experiences the same thing together. The VIP night is a gala with orchestral and cultural programming. The two general admission nights are, respectively, a comedy night with an A-list comedian (who is himself a watch collector), and closing ceremonies featuring a performance by an A-list musician. Names will be announced in due course, and no, I can’t say more yet (which is killing me, because these two shows alone would justify the ticket price!).
If you can’t make it
For those who can’t make it to Abu Dhabi… we’ve thought about you too. The daytime programme is being broadcast ‘professionally’ (includes a multi-camera production, a real director, on-screen graphics, hosts carrying the day, etc) by a team that has spent the past decade producing live broadcasts for some of the biggest streaming platforms on earth. Think of it like watching golf or F1; you have a lot of stuff going on in different places, and you need someone to share commentary as the director cuts to different cameras showing different scenes, and you need on-screen graphics to summarise what is going on in the shot you’re currently viewing - that’s what ‘professionally’ means (as opposed to a static camera just pointed as the stage or around the arena - that would be pointless!).
Plus, we’ve already started releasing a video series called The Road to The Escapement, where we’re visiting the participating brands and the people inside the ateliers. We’ve already shot several of these, including one where Romain Gauthier makes us fondue, which I mention purely because it’s the least press-release thing imaginable and that’s precisely the point. Rexhep’s video dropped last week, and hopefully by the time you’re reading this, we will have posted another (I think Luca Soprana, but can’t recall).
VIP versus GA
Actually, this is one other question I keep getting. A General Admission (GA) ticket gets you the weekend only; the full show, the stage programme, the activations, the comedy night and the closing performance. A VIP ticket gets you all of that too, plus the Friday, plus a dedicated VIP lounge inside the arena for all three days, and some exclusive content on the Friday. There’s also a VIP gala on Friday evening, and on all three nights the VIP tickets buy you front of stage seating as well.
The lounge is easy to explain; arenas are big, days are long, and having somewhere private to chill might be worth more to some than others. I guess more generally, it’s basically the same event with a different denominator. Only 1,000 VIP tickets will be sold, while the GA days are capped at 10,000. Same brands, same stands, same stage, same building... a tenth of the crowd.
If paying for fewer people sounds strange, consider that it’s arguably the purest luxury product there is. Most of what we call luxury is paying a premium for the absence of something… waiting, friction, queues, whatever. A first-class seat on a plane lands at the same time as economy; what you bought was space, comfort, and silence. So really, with a tenth of the crowd in the room, ‘absence’ ends up being ‘easier access’ to whatever is in the room.
There’s also one more thing, which I’ll share with the caveat that I really don’t know what shape it’ll take. Some brands have made it clear they want to look after the VIP group ‘properly’… call it a desire to serenade perhaps. What that means in practice will vary by brand and is still taking form, so I’m reporting the intent rather than promising any specifics. But if you think about it, the underlying logic is pretty sound; if you’re a brand and there are 1,000 of the most engaged collectors in the world under one roof, that’s a valuable captive audience.
None of this makes GA a ‘lesser’ product, to be clear. The weekend days are ‘the event as designed’, and they end each night with thousands of fellow collectors at a shared performance. Besides, the launch price for tickets are GA: 1600 AED ($435, £325) and VIP: 4400 AED ($1195, £895) so there’s too much value in the GA to say it’s a ‘lesser’ option. The VIP is just… more exclusive.
Note: Tickets will be launched in tranches… so this initial drop is early bird pricing, and then the prices will go up after each night time act is made public.
The way I’d frame this choice is that GA is for soaking in the show, and VIP is for longer private conversations; you’re optimising for depth, and paying for the smaller room in which depth can be achieved. Plus you get into the bigger room afterwards. You get both options, is the point.
Practical stuff
20-22 November 2026. Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi. Saturday and Sunday are the ticketed general admission days; tickets go live on Monday 15 June at 5pm UAE time, and you can sign up for notifications on our website right now. Tickets will be sold via the Etihad Arena website (which you can also navigate to via the button on our website once it’s live). Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the arena handles all ticket sales, and they keep your money until after the event - so there’s no risk of a ‘Fyre festival’ situation; if the event doesn’t happen, they’re keeping your money safe.
Nobody has tried to put the watch community in an arena before, and first editions of anything involve a level of uncertainty that I’ve come to accept as the price of building something new. The team includes large-scale-event veterans, who have collectively launched massive events for the last 20 years… so I mean, we could not have chosen a better team! And what I can tell you is that every decision (brand cap, stage rules, shared evenings, broadcast, etc) was made by asking one question over and over... ‘what would we want?’
In November, we will find out whether we answered this correctly. I’d love for you to be in the room when we do.
Hope to see you in Abu Dhabi! ✌️