How Black Watch Collectors Clubs Are Making Horology More Inclusive

Perri Dash didn’t know it yet, but in 2021, when he and his friends Rashawn Smith and Ashraf Rashid started meeting up at Fanelli Café, a storied dive bar in the heart of New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, to connect over their shared passion for timepieces, they were tapping into a growing community of Black watch collectors ready to step into the spotlight.

“We’d sit outside and have beers and burgers and we’d talk watches,” Dash tells Robb Report. “Everybody was shuttered in their homes, and it made me rethink how important community was. The minute everything lifted, I just wanted to get back outside. At the same time, all this watch content is exploding on social media and YouTube. It reinvigorated the passion.”

During those casual hangouts, it became clear to Dash that he and his friends—Black men who love design, history, and craftsmanship—were absent from the watch industry’s broader narrative. “I didn’t see us reflected in the watch world,” he says. “I knew we were out here collecting and moving markets quietly. I wanted a space where we could do it loudly, together.”

That realization sparked an idea for a watch podcast called Wrist Check. In the four years since Dash and Smith began their weekly video tapings (“Part of the discussion was like, ‘Let’s take what we’re doing here, put it on camera and see if that translates,’” Dash says), they’ve become bold-faced names in the high-end watch industry. Their growing profile has led to a host of events and collaborations with a global cohort of watch insiders, from a BBQ-turned-dance party with Ulysse Nardin, held on the Saturday night of Watches and Wonders Geneva, to a recent collector event in Detroit attended by a couple members of the Detroit Lions.

“Being a Black collector or a collector of color for a time felt kind of isolating because we just weren’t communicating with one another,” Dash says. “And then social media post-Covid explodes, and people are sharing pictures of their watches. And we discover that we’ve already been here just doing our own thing. Then it’s like, ‘All right, why don’t we just meet up and hang out?’ And so now we’re touring the country, holding events, working with brands. It’s kind of a wild time.”

Coombs offers a powerful analogy. “I compare it a lot to Black churches,” he says. “They were birthed from this idea of not being able to go to white churches. One of the cornerstones was, ‘Everybody’s welcome.’ A lot of the churches are Black, but it’s a safe space where everybody belongs. That’s why we talk about CP Time being a watch group ‘through the lens of Black culture.’ It’s an easy thing to be a part of—there’s no pretentiousness.”

“The bigger goal is to create a positive space where if you have a $50 watch, we can celebrate you,” he adds. “Where you can try on somebody’s Richard Mille or Patek. Where somebody that collects AP can say, ‘Hey man, that’s a dope TAG Heuer.’ Use this thing as a means to connect with people.”