DWW25 Was Not a Confirmation; It Was a Coronation.
Dubai Watch Week is Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons’ biennial, non-commercial gathering for the horological world, held under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. We have worked on it since 2020. For the seventh edition, marking ten years of DWW and 75 years of Ahmed Seddiqi, we were appointed across its entirety, from experience strategy and brand positioning, through the site study that moved the event, to the design of the environments themselves.
Underneath the commission sat a question horology has never resolved. How do you take something ultra-exclusive and make it for everyone? Exclusivity, by definition, excludes. DWW’s mandate runs the other way.
The site was over 200,000 square feet of Emaar’s Burj Park, Opera Garden and Opera Plaza, a public park carrying no infrastructure of any kind. Our remit covered the 90-metre Brand Exhibition and its courtyards, the House of Horology, the two-storey Ahmed Seddiqi Collectors Lounge, two Masterclass buildings, the Bonhams auction room, the outdoor stage, four entrance arches, 660 square metres of facade and 327 square metres of timber terracing. We also produced the masterplan: where everything sat, how the site connected, and how 49,000 people would move through it across five days.
DIFC gave Dubai Watch Week a great deal. A built-in ambience, high-end restaurants on the doorstep, passing clientele, and 36,000 residents who lent the event an audience it never had to earn. It was also where DWW was brought into being. By 2023 it had reached the limit of what the district could hold, brands were being turned away, and the character of the place was fixed, because a financial district will always feel like a financial district.
Moving to a blank canvas had been under consideration for years. We were commissioned to study it properly, and we recommended it. The risk was substantial. Burj Park offered no buildings, no services, no restaurants, no passing footfall, nothing to lean on. Everything that made an evening at DIFC feel effortless had to be conceived, built, and then taken away again, and the brands who had invested heavily in DIFC were reluctant to follow. We had to build a world that borrowed nothing except the skyline, with the Burj Khalifa standing over it like a dropped pin in case anyone forgot where they were.
What deserves saying plainly is that the DWW and Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons team had the audacity to aim that high and the nerve to hold it.
The design followed the strategy, and the strategy began with positioning. Plotted across two axes, specialist to mass appeal and exclusive to approachable, the industry's events clustered in one corner. Watches and Wonders, Baselworld at its peak, Geneva Watch Days, all fighting over the same people. The territory where a subject as specialist as haute horology was delivered with real openness sat empty. DWW was already close to it. We recommended taking it and owning it.
That meant dialling up what made DWW distinct. It was non-commercial, so brands competed on creativity through a theme we set. Entry was free. A first-timer stood in the same room as the CEO of Rolex. Every other event in the industry was somewhere people went to work. DWW was where the industry came for love, and money waited outside. This was horology through a Dubai lens.
One thing came back in every interview: DWW gave the industry time. So the central idea was to embrace the luxury of time, and we designed the serendipity that produced it. The exhibition grid gave way to a journey through a temporary village terraced into ground drone-mapped to a point cloud. Open pockets sat where routes converged. Three courtyards drawn from Arabic architecture broke the run of the Brand Exhibition, each lit by an LED skylight synchronised to the sun outside. Booth walls grew denser towards the rear, granting privacy while sight lines carried through. Across ninety brands, every concept was assessed against experiential guidelines we wrote with DWW. Pedigree exempted nobody.
49,000 visitors across five days, up 113% on 2023. 72,840 registrations, up 108%, from 195 nationalities. Brand participation grew 46% to more than ninety, including 29 first-time exhibitors. 250+ media on site, 5,000+ clippings and $18 million in PR value, with coverage in the New York Times, the Financial Times, WWD, Esquire and GQ. Dwell time rose 40%, the figure that mattered most to us, because dwell time was what the serendipity was designed to buy. The site was built in six weeks.
Jean-Frédéric Dufour, CEO of Rolex, gave a rare public keynote. The industry's first C-suite roundtable put Breitling, Chopard, Audemars Piguet and Hublot on one stage. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum arrived unannounced and toured the site with the Seddiqi family. Rolex committed to a pavilion built for the next two editions, a permanent investment in a temporary event. The editor of JCK called it "Baselworld meets Coachella meets the TED Conference". Chronoswiss said we had "created a benchmark that will inspire and challenge the entire industry for years to come". The design won Best Event Space Design & Décor at the 2026 Middle East Event Awards.
The landscape has shifted. Brands now meet actual consumers instead of dealers and sales representatives, and they are already signing for 2027. The site has been outgrown after a single edition. Dubai Watch Week exists for the love, promotion and preservation of horology, and 2025 delivered on that beyond what anyone expected.
