Move Over, Dubai: The Best Watch Week in the World Might Be in the Rockies

This story is from an installment of In the Loupe, our weekly insider newsletter about the best of the watch world. Sign up here. If you’ve dreamed of attending Dubai Watch Week, the biennial horological fest in the Arabian desert that held its seventh edition in late November, but haven’t had time to fly halfway around the world, there’s a more accessible option—at least in terms of flight time—right here in the USA. Staged across four days in mid-August, Watch Week Aspen just celebrated its third and largest edition. Picture a downsized, alpine chic version of the Dubai event set not in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa, but against the backdrop of Colorado’s Aspen Mountain. It’s got the same well-heeled clientele, many of the same watch brands and a similar focus on appreciating rarefied wristwatches in an intimate environment in the company of dozens of like-minded souls—though here it’s cowboy hats and denim in place of abayas and dishdashas. Founded in 2024 by Elizabeth Smith Hrubala (pictured below, fourth from right) and her father, Oliver Smith (pictured below, right)—founder of Oliver Smith Jeweler, a multi-brand retailer in Scottsdale, Ariz., that opened a second-story location on Aspen’s Hyman Avenue in 2020—Watch Week Aspen this year welcomed more than 300 collectors. Collectively, says Hrubala, they spent millions. “We’ve seen the same faces for the last two years, but now they’re bringing friends and they’re bringing family,” she tells Robb Report. “I have this family—the father and son came the first year. Then they brought a couple cousins. Now they brought even more cousins, uncles, aunts. It’s like they just keep bringing people, which is amazing. And I think it speaks to how everyone feels about it: They had such a great time, now they’re inviting others.” It’s not difficult to understand why. First, there is the undeniable appeal of Aspen in August. “Most people still really know Aspen for the winter, but the summer is so special,” Hrubala says. “It used to be called the ‘secret season.’ It’s not so much a secret anymore, as you can tell.” Second is the caliber and growing number of participants. Home to 14 watch brands—including A. Lange & Söhne, Analog:Shift, Blancpain, Buccellati, Cyrus Watches, Gerald Charles, Glashütte Original, Hermès, IWC, L. Leroy, Moritz Grossmann, Norqain, and Omega—the gathering differs from Dubai Watch Week in one important respect: The Middle East event is dominated by a single multi-brand retailer, its founder, Ahmed Seddiqi. Watch Week Aspen, on the other hand, features other participating stores—namely, Avi & Co., Betteridge, Meridian Jewelers and M.S. Rau. Third is the wide selection of unique wristwatches on offer. In keeping with the town’s reputation as the ultimate billionaire’s playground, every brand that takes part caters to clients seeking rarefied, one-of-a-kind timepieces. When I popped by the new Aspen outpost of M.S. Rau, the legendary, family-owned antique gallery from New Orleans, I was immediately drawn to a steel Patek Philippe with a salmon dial that combined a world time function with a flyback chronograph. At $64,00, it could easily work as a stocking stuffer for many Aspenites—especially in light of the store’s other offerings, such as the $7 million Monet that hung in the front gallery—but it was unlike any World Timer I’d ever seen. M.S. Rau, which opened its permanent Galena Street location about five months ago, also displayed one of the 100 Ulysse Nardin x Urwerk “UR-Freak” models unveiled at Dubai Watch Week (sticker price: $162,000), not to mention numerous ice-covered styles, including a piece unique Piaget loaded with 5 carats of cascading, brilliant-cut diamonds. When I asked Chris Drake, the company’s chief operating officer and watch buyer, how he would describe demand for luxury watches in Aspen, he had a one-word reply: “Insatiable.” (“I’m afraid I didn’t bring enough,” he later elaborated.) On Friday morning at Avi & Co., founder and CEO Avi Hiaeve, fresh from Miami, showed off a Rolex Daytona with a rare obsidian dial set with blue sapphire baguette hour markers, a bezel of blue sapphires and diamond-accented lugs, valued at $1.2 million. “I expect it to be gone by Monday or Tuesday,” store manager Robyn Lamson told me. Later that day, when I stopped by the A. Lange & Söhne boutique operated by Meridian Jewelers, the space was buzzing with collectors eager to speak to Charles Langlois, brand president of the Americas. Like the other executives who attended Watch Week Aspen—among them Moritz Grossmann CEO Christine Hutter, who traveled from Germany, and Hugo Lesizza, international sales and marketing manager for Switzerland-based L.Leroy—Langlois seemed to share the understanding that Aspen was an ideal place to sell high-end wristwatches, given that pretty much anyone shopping there was, by virtue of simply being in Aspen, pre-qualified. I got a taste of that when I boarded my flight on Thursday from Los Angeles. Ahead of me, a man wearing a green Goyard backpack and Goyard duffel walked behind his wife and twin sons. The boys, about six years old, carried matching backpacks from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera. After landing, we all went our separate ways. Then I saw the foursome at a Champagne and complications event at M.S. Rau, the first of many sightings across town. When I finally introduced myself to the dad, outside the Betteridge boutique on Saturday morning, during a vintage watch fest presented by Analog:Shift, he said he’d brought the family to Aspen specifically for watch week. I couldn’t help but admire the pieces he was double-wristing: On his left arm, he wore a rare H. Moser & Cie. model with a Vantablack dial marked with an “X,” and on his right, an unusual Alto in bronze. I began to sense a theme. The many collectors I spoke to at the cocktail parties, watch talks and new collection unveilings that made up the Watch Week Aspen schedule, were unabashed fans of independent watchmaking. At the Friday night collector cocktail sponsored by Betteridge and Blancpain, for example, Ron Champagne, a physician from Peoria, Ill., showed off a pre-owned Sport Auto from Laurent Ferrier, but said he had his eyes on pieces from Moritz Grossmann and Hermès (the Le Temps Suspendu, or Time Suspended, model in the Cut’s pebble-like case, in particular). Champagne was familiar to me from some of the other Watch Week Aspen events I’d attended, which is why I decided to approach him. Plus, he was talking watches with another collector I recognized from my visit to the Lange boutique, whose name, I soon learned, was Jeff Schmalbach. The men, both in town on their own, sans wives, had met IRL the day before and were clearly reveling in the moment. “We met via WhatsApp months ago,” said Schmalbach, aka @modernwatchguyatx, a collector from Austin, Texas, who was attending his second Watch Week Aspen. “We had a common connection, and that’s what this is all about. There are so many of us that never get a chance to see each other. We’ve met and we’ve built relationships digitally. Events like Watch Week bring us together. It’s super cool.” Schmalback, who wore a sporty Polaris Chrono from Jaeger-LeCoultre, also highlighted the informal nature of the event: “It’s a place where you get to build relationships with the brands beyond trying to buy from them.” And that’s the point. Like its older sibling event in Dubai, Watch Week Aspen succeeds because it fosters an easygoing environment where collectors can talk shop with people who love watches as much as they do. Yet judging by the family trees multiplying across the guest list, and the collectors flying in solo just to meet their WhatsApp friends in person, Watch Week Aspen has found something Dubai, for all its scale and spectacle, can’t quite replicate: timepieces with enough distinction that even the majestic peaks of nearby Maroon Bells, widely considered the most photographed mountains in North America, have to compete for attention.