FounderFest 2026: A New Kind of Watch Fair Is Coming to London

Credit - The Founder Fest

If traditional watch fairs conjure up images of glass cabinets, serious faces and people discussing movement finishing with the intensity of a UN summit, FounderFest is attempting something a little different.

Created by Time+Tide, FounderFest is a new celebration of independent watchmaking taking place across London, New York and Melbourne on 19–20 September 2026. The idea is to bring together watches, their founders, collectors and live music in a format that feels rather more like a festival than a conventional trade show.

What is FounderFest?

The focus is firmly on independent watch brands and, more importantly, the people behind them.

Seven brands are involved in the inaugural event: Awake, Baltic, Beaucroft, Dennison, echo/neutra, Furlan Marri and Serica. Each has created an exclusive Time+Tide Studio Edition, with the watches inspired in some way by the music and culture that influenced their founders.

That gives FounderFest a slightly different angle. Rather than simply putting a new dial colour in a cabinet and asking everyone to admire it, the event is built around the stories behind the watches.

And there are some genuinely interesting pieces involved.

Baltic, for example, has produced a new version of its Heures du Monde worldtimer, complete with the brand's first forged-carbon dial. Awake has created an elaborate lacquer-dial watch using the Vietnamese Sơn Mài technique, while Dennison's contribution takes inspiration from 1960s Britain with a blue mother-of-pearl dual-time watch.

FounderFest London

For UK collectors, the important date is Saturday 19 September 2026.

The London FounderFest will take place at Time+Tide's Watch Discovery Studio and includes dedicated sessions with Awake and Baltic, watch launches, founder conversations and an evening of live music.

Perhaps most surprisingly, tickets are just £10.

In the world of luxury watches, that's approximately the price of looking at a Rolex polishing cloth, so it makes FounderFest unusually accessible for anyone interested in discovering smaller brands or simply spending a day around other watch enthusiasts.

Seven new watches – and a very short buying window

All seven FounderFest watches will make their public debut during the event.

There is then a 24-hour worldwide online purchasing window on 22 September. After that, the Studio Editions are due to remain available exclusively through Time+Tide's physical Discovery Studios in London, Melbourne and New York.

That alone should make FounderFest worth watching, even if you don't attend in person.

Why we think FounderFest is interesting

Independent watches have become one of the most interesting parts of the industry.

Smaller brands can experiment with colours, materials, case shapes and ideas that would be far harder to push through a huge multinational watch company. They can also give collectors something increasingly valuable: a watch with a story that hasn't already been told a thousand times.

FounderFest appears to understand that.

Rather than trying to recreate Watches and Wonders on a smaller scale, Time+Tide is putting the founders themselves at the centre of the event and adding music, interviews and enthusiast gatherings around them.

Will it work? We'll find out in September.

But at £10 for the London event, it might be one of the cheaper ways of spending a Saturday surrounded by interesting watches.

And, as anyone who has spent too much time browsing Chrono24 will confirm, opportunities to describe this hobby as cheap should probably be celebrated whenever they occur.