Watch Week Aspen Draws 300-Plus Collectors and 19 Brands in 3rd Year

By Victoria Gomelsky | August 19, 2026

In early 2024, Elizabeth Smith Hrubala and her father, Oliver Smith, were spitballing ideas for a watch event they wanted to organize in Aspen, the billionaire’s playground in Colorado where they had recently opened a multibrand watch and jewelry store.

“The summer here is so special,” says Hrubala, managing director of Oliver Smith Jeweler, which opened in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1984, and expanded to a second-story location on Aspen’s Hyman Avenue in 2020. “It used to be called ‘the secret season.’ It’s not so much a secret anymore. But we knew we wanted to have it in the summer, so we had to move pretty quick.”

That August, the Smiths presided over the first edition of Watch Week Aspen, a four-day event that takes place in restaurants, galleries, and retail boutiques across town. Though modest in size, it attracted enough brands and collectors to spawn subsequent editions.

The third annual Watch Week Aspen, which was held Aug. 13–16, welcomed more than 300 collectors and 19 participating brands, including watchmakers such as A. Lange & Söhne, Blancpain, Hermès, and Omega, as well as five retailers: Avi & Co., Betteridge, Meridian Jewelers, M.S. Rau, and, of course, Oliver Smith Jeweler.

Watch Week Aspen Oliver Smith Jeweler RBock — *The Oliver Smith Jeweler team, including Elizabeth Smith Hrubala (c.) and Oliver Smith (far r.)*

“The secret sauce of Aspen is we all know each other,” Hrubala says. “We also know that serious collectors shop at many different locations. They shop all over the world with different brands. That’s no secret.”

The decentralized event was so successful that the Smiths are already looking ahead to the 2027 edition. Below, Hrubala shares her top retail-centric insights—about working with competitors, investing in independent brands, and creating a realistic plan for growth.

From competitors to cohosts

While retailer-hosted events have a proven track record of attracting clients and providing experiences that continue to pay dividends long after the events have closed, most retailers aren’t open to working with their competitors.

In a close-knit community such as Aspen, however, uniting a handful of multibrand watch and jewelry retailers behind a common cause simply made sense.

“In the spirit of Aspen, it wasn’t as challenging as it could have been,” Hrubala says. “I think they recognized that it was a good idea. It’s a really small town, there are lots of watch dealers here. That’s just a fact. So how do you make the most of that? Here’s an opportunity where we can all work together to make a great weekend.”

Hrubala notes that given Watch Week Aspen’s decentralized nature, every participating brand was able to curate its own offering. The retailer Betteridge, which was acquired by the Watches of Switzerland Group (WOSG) in 2021, teamed up with the watchmaker Blancpain to host a collector welcome party on Friday night at Casterline|Goodman Gallery in Aspen’s city center. The store also held an event on Saturday morning, where a showcase of models curated by the WOSG-owned vintage dealer Analog:Shift drew swarms of collectors.

Watch Week Aspen M.S. Rau photo by RBock — *A collector event at M.S. Rau’s new Aspen boutique*

At M.S. Rau, the legendary, family-owned New Orleans–based antique gallery that opened a permanent Aspen location in March, a preview event on the festival’s opening day drew a number of early bird collectors, while a series of watch talks (“Rebellious by Design at M.S. Rau: Watches That Broke the Rules”) continued to attract attendees over the weekend.

Hrubala says the freedom each store had to host its own activities was key to the event’s success. “All the brands and retailers activated in their own spaces,” she says. “They could do whatever they want. But we’re all doing it over the course of the same weekend. So it allows us to work together while also showcasing independence.”

Independent watchmaking is on fire

If you follow the high-end watch trade, it will come as no surprise that the independent category—referring to brands that don’t belong to large, corporate-owned luxury groups—has been on a meteoric rise since the pandemic.

Watch Week Aspen catered to that growing interest in two ways: The gathering featured numerous indie brands, including Cyrus Watches, Gerald Charles, L. Leroy, Moritz Grossmann, and Norqain. And, on Saturday afternoon, Oliver Smith Jeweler hosted “The Independent Revolution,” a panel discussion featuring Moritz Grossmann CEO Christine Hutter, Cyrus Watches CEO Mirko Bertolucci, and George Reid, director of fine timepieces at Oliver Smith Jeweler, moderated by WatchTime magazine publisher Sara Orlando.

Watch Week Aspen Oliver Smith Jeweler panel RBock — *A panel on independent watchmaking at Oliver Smith Jeweler*

“What started six or seven years ago is collectors began looking for more unique pieces and small series,” Hutter told the standing-room-only crowd. “What they want is not a big quantity of watches. Everybody knows Rolex. The independents came up and they found a new way.

“Independent watchmakers are more flexible,” she added. “If you look at our company, if we want to create something, we sit together in a team—the designer, construction, and sales team is involved. And then we discuss what we can do. If we decide something, we do not have to wait until a big group behind us is telling us what we can do or what we cannot do. We can really decide, get up from the table, and start to push the production of new pieces.”

From Hrubala’s perspective, the growing chatter around independent watchmaking resonates with seasoned collectors who have already bought into the big brands and are looking for something different.

On the importance of community

Among the collectors who attended Watch Week Aspen, many cited the event’s community spirit as a primary draw. Jeff Schmalbach, aka @modernwatchguyatx, a collector from Austin, Texas, who was attending his second Watch Week Aspen, told JCK that he first met the Smiths when he lived in Scottsdale. He was such a fan of their store that his wife threw him a 40th-birthday party there.

Flying into Aspen for the family’s big watch festival was a no-brainer—especially because he’d met other collectors on WhatsApp groups who were also coming.

“We had a common connection, and that’s what this is all about,” Schmalbach says. “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.”

Watch Week Aspen photo by RBock — *At Watch Week Aspen, wrist shots were de rigueur.*

As Hrubala looks to the future, she knows that growth will never come at the cost of sacrificing the intimate environment that’s made the week successful in the first place.

“My goal always from the beginning has been to grow organically,” she says. “We had so many requests in the beginning from people coming in and saying, ‘You could do this, let’s make it huge.’ But that was missing the point of what we want this to be, which is a true watch collector event where it is small enough and manageable enough that everyone can meet each other, mingle, really feel like it’s a community.”

Top: Watch Week Aspen’s closing party took place on Saturday, Aug. 15, at the W Aspen (all photos: R. Bock)