Geneva Watch Days just closed its seventh edition, and the numbers alone tell a story worth pausing on: 71 brands, nearly 400 new releases and more than 2,500 collectors, private clients and enthusiasts who showed up across five days in early September. That last figure more than doubled compared with 2025, which says something about where this event sits in the watch calendar now, six years after it began as an improvised answer to a pandemic that had cancelled Baselworld and shut every manufacture in Switzerland.
We sat down with Jean-Christophe Babin, President of the Geneva Watch Days Association and CEO of Bulgari, to talk through how a stopgap idea turned into one of the industry’s most watched fixtures. Below is a short primer to set up the interview itself.
From Emergency Fix To Fixture
Babin doesn’t dress up the origin story. In 2020, with Baselworld and the SIHH both cancelled and no venue available for another year, he and a handful of friends in the industry pitched an idea to the Geneva authorities: forget the fixed roof, let brands exhibit wherever they like, from their own manufacture to a hotel suite with the beds pulled out. The founding brands ran it themselves, with staff seconded for a few weeks rather than a standing organisation, which kept costs at effectively zero.
What began as a way to dodge lockdown restrictions turned out to solve problems the industry hadn’t fully named. Brands got creative freedom that traditional fairs never allowed. Babin recalls fighting for months, back in his Basel days, just to get permission to park a Formula 1 car outside a booth. At Geneva Watch Days, a brand asks the city directly and gets an answer in days, not months.
Why Small Brands Keep Signing Up
One thread running through the conversation is scale, or rather the deliberate avoidance of it. Babin points out that the majority of Geneva Watch Days brands post revenues below fifty million francs, some well under twenty, while the bulk of Watches and Wonders exhibitors sit above two hundred million. For an independent brand, a stand at Geneva Watch Days costs from around ten thousand francs and delivers, in his words, six months of relationship-building compressed into five days.
That independent-friendly model appears to be paying off in ways nobody quite planned for. Babin notes that of the 84 nominees announced for this year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, 37 % came from brands that exhibit at Geneva Watch Days, despite the GPHG jury having no visibility into who shows where. Names like Krayon and Naoya Hida & Co., both regulars at the event, are part of that cohort.
A Fair Built On Friendship, Not Transactions
Perhaps the most striking part of the interview is how deliberately Babin frames the event against transactional fair culture. He describes evenings that continue past the formal meetings, power breakfasts pairing watch executives with hospitality bosses, and even a philosophical panel on the nature of time featuring Nobel laureate Didier Queloz. He is candid that the association capped this year’s brand count at 71 and plans to hold roughly steady around 65 to 68 next year, precisely to stop the format tipping into the rushed, meeting-after-meeting rhythm he associates with bigger fairs.
The 2026 edition also leaned harder into public access than any previous year, with nearly 5,000 unique visitors to the Pavillon and close to 3,000 at the Blue Box, plus a Phillips charity auction that raised CHF 115,500 for the Geneva Watchmaking School. Family activities for children ran across the closing weekend, something Babin discusses at length in the interview as a way of letting parents browse watches without distraction while their kids learn something themselves.
Watch the full interview below for Babin’s take on decentralisation, the hospitality industry’s lessons for watch retail and why we still call Geneva Watch Days “a meeting with friends” after seven years.