F.P. Journe Was the Hottest Brand at Wynn Las Vegas’s New Watch Summit

This past weekend, at the inaugural Time at Wynn event at Wynn Las Vegas, 150 or so high-end watch collectors—handpicked by the hotel or the eight watch brands that participated—attended panel discussions, got sneak peeks of unreleased timepieces, and talked watches into the wee hours, fueled by cocktails and bites from the property’s luxe lounges and restaurants.

To this observer, what the first-time gathering made clear—beyond the cultural cachet that luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary watches now command (Exhibit A: at a Friday afternoon panel on the rise of independent watchmaking, Mark Wahlberg popped in)—is that intimate collector events, such as Time at Wynn and Watch Week Aspen, are getting tons of buzz, the growing mania for independent makers shows no signs of slowing, and one brand in particular dominates the conversation.

“I might be the only one in the room not wearing a Journe,” Las Vegas developer Patrick Brennan said on a Saturday collectors panel that might as well have been subtitled, “How I Acquired My First F.P. Journe.” (Brennan opted to wear a model by Greubel Forsey that day).

Journe—both the man, François-Paul, and the Geneva brand he has built, since 1999, into an independent watchmaking powerhouse—was the elephant in the room at Time at Wynn. None of his timepieces were officially on display, though countless attendees sported them like wrist trophies. During the collector panel, Sandeep Chugani, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group in Miami, offered insight into why Journe, which has been burning up the secondary market since the pandemic, is experiencing such a meteoric rise.

“I think a lot of us were scarred by the traditional AD relationship and being told, ‘You’ve got to buy this to get that,’” Chugani told the audience, referring to the practice of “bundling” employed by many authorized dealers when determining which coveted models they’ll allocate to clients. “‘And it became a linear optimization game where you were going to be minus here, a little plus there. But I think it got to a point where it stopped becoming about the watch. It became about the game and the chase and the winning. I think the indie thing has changed that dramatically.

“The beauty of Journe is you don’t get a watch unless you can actually engage with the brand on a very deep level,” Chugani added. “You have to be able to explain why that complication is something you want, why it resonates with you. The game is tapped into a streak of passion. So it’s not a game, it’s about passion, which is what this weekend is really about.”

Pauly Freedman, senior vice president of resorts and partnerships at Wynn Las Vegas and one of the masterminds behind Time at Wynn, told Robb Report that the watch fest is the latest in a series of culturally relevant events—such as Concours, the Wynn’s annual gathering of car enthusiasts—the property has created to serve its clientele.

“It took us about a year to put together to make sure that we were creating the right event that didn’t feel like a trade show or a hard sell,” Freedman said. “A community of passionate watch collectors, some aspirational, but more so people that are really passionate about it. We put that list together while we were finding the right balance between a couple of the big Swiss maisons like Breguet and Girard-Perregaux, and the independents. This independents craze today is just amazing. Some people, I think, are maybe intimidated by it. And this environment created an opportunity for you to meet one-on-one not the salespeople, but the presidents of the companies, the watchmakers, the artisans of these brands. Obviously, Wynn does hospitality best, right? So that was really our focal point. How do we create this safe, fun space where people can come in and do their own show and tell, learn, get a bit of a peek behind the scenes?”

Collectors paid $1,500 to attend the weekend. In exchange, they got access to some of the most interesting people in the business. Martin Frei, cofounder and chief designer of Urwerk, held court in one of the Wynn’s Fairway Villas, where collectors (such as Imagine Dragons’ bassist Ben McKee) came by to admire two timepieces the brand will introduce in the coming weeks, one a precious metal version of an existing model and the other a brand new piece reflecting Urwerk’s signature fascination with theoretical physics.

“Vegas is this incredibly surreal place,” Frei said, as he gazed out the window at the Sphere and imagined how it could be used to tell time. “The casino is kind of like the black hole of capitalism.”

Which isn’t to say that Frei, a Vegas newbie, was turned off by the spectacle of Sin City. Having driven in from Los Angeles, he was captivated by the starkness of the desert landscape: “You have an endless sky—it’s quite inspiring.”

Back at the Wynn’s Mouton Ballroom, the hub of events for Time at Wynn, high-level brand representatives—including Vincent Brasesco, brand president of U.S. and Canada at Breguet; Claudio Terjanian, president of the Americas at H. Moser & Cie. and Hautlence; Jean-Marc Bories, head of North America at MB&F; and Ruggero Mango, president of the Americas at Girard-Perregaux—presided over showcases featuring watches that were new or had only been seen by a handful of people. Across the room, another set of cases displayed pieces by the indie brands Biver, Pattern Recognition, and Alex Crown, a luxury menswear label that offers bespoke watch straps.

Notably, Pierre Halimi, the affable general manager of F.P. Journe North America, attended the event, and even though the brand didn’t show a single watch there, he came across as something of an unofficial ambassador, not to mention a good sport—throughout the weekend, attendees, both collectors and brand reps, gently ribbed him about allocations.

At the Friday panel on independent watchmaking, Halimi joined Michael Friedman, former head of complications at Audemars Piguet and founder of Pattern Recognition, and Alexandre Hazemann and Victor Monnin—whose eponymous brand, Hazemann & Monnin, won the second edition of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives earlier this year—for an hourlong chat moderated by Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches at the NYC-based retailer Material Good.

“Independence means freedom for your creation,” Halimi told the audience. “Because if you’re not free from any constraints, then you have to prostitute yourself in case it’s a bad time, like, let’s say, 2008-2009. True independence is when you are free to be. Period.”

Friedman elaborated on that definition. “A lot of so-called independent brands are actually beholden to their own shareholders,” he said. “So how much independence do they have? As collectors, the question should be, when you’re meeting the visionaries of the brand, how much agency do they have in the short, mid, and long term? I tell young watchmakers, ‘Beautiful work, great designs, but what is the ethos of the business? What does independence mean to you? What do you want to preserve? What do you refuse to give up?’ That, to me, is independence—the ability to say, ‘F, no.’”

The notion of power and who wields it in the watch business came up again later in the discussion after Ben-Yehuda asked the panelists what they thought was fueling the insatiable interest in independent watchmaking.

“Collectors drive the market today,” Friedman said. “It’s no longer in the hands of marketing departments, it’s no longer in the hands of retailers. And the collectors are looking for independent thinking, independent viewpoints, different designs, different shapes, different ideas. How many of the classics can you own?”

Of course, the question of how many timepieces you can own from an independent maker—at least when it comes to buying on the primary market—is another story. Hazemann & Monnin makes 20 watches a year. When Ben-Yehuda asked the two friends and business partners how they decide who gets one, Hazemann was direct.

“It’s very difficult because there are many good people in the watchmaking industry, but we care about finding people who, like us, really care about watches,” he said. “And we want to share our journey together. We put some filters in. If the collector doesn’t want to travel and to visit us, that’s the first point. If it’s only transactional, it’s not very interesting. But if we spend some time together, to have a lunch, to visit the workshop, OK, now we start to consider and to advocate. But at the end, I think we work with our guts—it’s all about feeling.”

This article originally appeared in Robb Report US.