The 5 Most Important Things We Learned at Geneva Watch Days 2025

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When Geneva Watch Days was founded in the summer of 2020, just five months after the start of the pandemic, it was conceived as an intimate, informal, and decentralized gathering of mostly independent watchmakers who sought to make the most of an uncertain time.

At last week’s sixth annual showing, it was clear to veterans and newcomers alike that the event, now home to 66 participating brands, has grown well beyond its original vision. With big names such as TAG Heuer and its sibling brands in the LVMH stable now involved, the show serves as a reliable barometer of industry sentiment on the brink of the fall season.

Here are five takeaways from the week and its various events.

The Tariffs Are Kicking an Industry That’s Already Down
The mood around Geneva was surprisingly upbeat, even as watch executives openly acknowledged the difficulty of doing business at a time when economic uncertainty, amplified by President Trump’s 39 percent tariff on Swiss imports, is threatening to unravel the gains of the pandemic.

“It’s tough—everyone is suffering,” Davide Cerrato, CEO of Bremont, said during a press appointment where the brand showed its new MB Meteor Stealth Grey limited edition. “We had cycles of crisis every seven years, and then it becomes every three years. And this one is exceptionally long. Normally, it would last a few months, and then you have a bounce back, and now it’s almost one year that [business] is low.”

Industry stats bear out his concerns. While the total value of Swiss watch exports in the first half of 2025 declined slightly, at -1.4 percent, the real concern is over sell-out figures. According to Thierry Huron, founder of the Mercury Project, a Swiss watch and jewelry consultancy that publishes the monthly Sell-Out Index, which tracks sales at retail, “watch sales in the U.S. stalled in the first half of the year, down 0.7 percent, after +5.5 percent in 2024,” Huron wrote. “From January 2025 to June 2025, sales growth was very weak, reaching a high of 1.8 percent in April and a low of -1.7 percent in June, the first decline in six months, reflecting growing concern over the impact of U.S. tariffs.”

Independent Watchmakers Are Better Off Than Big Brands—Especially if Their Name Is Rexhep Rexhepi
Rexhepi hosted the hottest party in town on the eve of Geneva Watch Days’ opening, when the who’s who of the industry—including collectors, suppliers, dealers, journalists, and rival brand executives—gathered at his Old Town Geneva atelier to celebrate the inauguration of his new workshop.

The crowd, which had spilled out on to the cobblestone lane in front of the building by the time Robb Report arrived (leading one guest to declare the street “Rue de Rexhep”) included Pierre Biver, creative director of the high-end brand Biver; Mark Cho, cofounder of the Armoury; Andy and Alex Rosenfield, the father-and-son co-owners of the revived Urban Jürgensen brand; Aurel Bacs, of Bacs & Russo in Geneva, where he heads Phillips’s watch department; collector Gary Getz, who proudly showed off his own RR Chronomètre Contemporain I special; and Silas Walton, the founder and chief executive of A Collected Man, a dealer of rare pre-owned and independent watches in London.

“Rexhep does something that hardly anyone else does,” Bacs told Robb Report. “He delivers a meaningful quality piece at a meaningful price at quantities which are defined by the team of hands he has available. As long as his stock classic RRCC II that is retailing for 150,000 Swiss francs, give or take, has a five to 10 years-long wait list and people are ready to pay seven, eight, nine, 10 times retail, that means if client number one drops out because of the geopolitical situation, tariffs, Swiss francs, exchange rates, there are 999 people queuing for a watch that has an annual output of 10. He is, as far as I’m concerned, immune.”

The Battle for Mechanical Supremacy Is on
At Geneva Watch Days, TAG Heuer lived up to the promise embedded in its Techniques d’Avant Garde name when it unveiled the new Monaco Flyback Chronograph TH-Carbonspring, a $17,900 timepiece featuring an unexpected technical achievement: a state-of-the-art carbon hairspring. Billed as a robust alternative to the industry-standard silicon hairspring used by many manufacturers (ahem, Rolex), the introduction could be seen as the latest salvo in the precision wars, an ongoing competition among the industry’s biggest brands to produce the most technically superior mechanical timepiece. 

The carbon hairspring, which TAG highlighted in large-scale photographs at its Geneva Watch Days salon at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, is “not just about innovation,” Antoine Pin, TAG Heuer’s CEO, told Robb Report. “It’s about becoming more and more of a watchmaker as well.”

Innovation Will Be a Casualty of the Current Climate
Let’s not forget that TAG Heuer began developing the TH-Carbonspring a decade ago, long before tariffs were a consideration. While watchmakers continue to proselytize about their commitment to innovation, the economic reality is more complicated.

“The reason why Switzerland, Singapore, Dubai are regions that are really attractive to people is because they are stable,” Pin said. “We need stability to invest. No one’s making big decisions right now. You’re trying to be extremely agile and adapt because you never know what’s going to happen six months from now.”

All Eyes Are on the Watch World’s Next Big Gathering
Scores of brands provided glimpses of watches under embargo until November. Why then? Because that’s when the seventh edition of Dubai Watch Week, the biannual event which this year runs from Nov. 19 to 23 at Dubai Mall, Burj Park, will open. Ever since the pandemic disrupted the trade’s traditional market cycle, brands have begun spacing their introductions throughout the year as opposed to exclusively waiting for Watches & Wonders for their big reveals.

This year, numerous brands are planning big debuts in Dubai, a reflection of how important the collector-focused event has become to an industry that thrives on networking. See you there!