Watchmaking In 2025: A Conversation With Wrist Check Pod At UBS House Of Craft

For a hobby built on patience, watch culture in 2025 felt strangely impatient.

At UBS House of Craft, Wrist Check Pod hosts Perri Dash and Rashawn Smith joined a conversation that surfaced one of the year’s clearest truths: the tension between the algorithmic urge to react and the rarer skill of knowing what you actually like. It’s a tension shaping how watches are understood.

Set against the Icons of Time exhibition, the discussion circled the idea of what makes a watch “iconic” today. The answer wasn’t purely technical or historical. Icon status still requires originality and influence, the kind that sets a tone others follow. But it also depends on something less measurable: emotional residue. A watch lasts when it carries story, intention, and enough cultural weight to remain legible across generations.

Releases barely land before the next one arrives. Genuinely historic achievements struggle to register before the news cycle moves on. Brands chase momentum, audiences chase novelty, and even meaningful work risks being flattened into content. In that environment, taste becomes harder to develop and easier to outsource.

Wrist Check’s rise offers a counterpoint. Its appeal comes from conversation rather than declaration. From collecting widely rather than hierarchically. From treating a G-SHOCK and a Datograph with the same curiosity. Guests arrive without needing to perform expertise, and often leave realizing they’ve been collectors all along. Exposure, not instruction, becomes the entry point.

That dynamic reflects how watch culture is actually functioning now. Authority is no longer granted solely by institutions or archives. It’s built through participation, shared language, and the willingness to sit with an object long enough to understand why it exists. Emotion matters again, not as hype, but as something durable. Is the reaction lasting, or is it just FOMO dressed well?

If 2025 ends up being remembered for anything, it may be this sorting moment. A year when resilience mattered, but intention mattered more. When people began deciding whether they genuinely loved watches, or simply loved the velocity around them.

What this conversation ultimately reinforces, and something we keep returning to at Super Niche, is simple: future icons need time to sit. So do we.

The full video is worth watching not for a list of watches, but for the space it creates to slow down and listen.