Inside Hong Kong’s newly inclusive watch collecting community: how members’ clubs Watch Ho & Co. and The Horology Club are making timepieces cool – and accessible – for millennials and Gen Z
- The finer things in life deserve to be shared with fellow connoisseurs – thankfully, Hong Kong is a hub for horology, with a growing and welcoming community of collectors and experts
- Unlike earlier, snobbier clubs like Vintage Rolex Club and Hong Kong Watch Club, Watch Ho & Co. and The Horology Club are welcoming new members with inventive networking events and an open-minded approach
If you were a watch collector pre-pandemic looking for places to share your passion, seek insights from other collectors or just hang out to talk about your favourite pieces, you might have not known where to start. There were limited organised avenues of engagement with Hong Kong’s most prominent watch-loving communities of the time. Vintage Rolex Club and Hong Kong Watch Club, for example, may still be posting wrist shots on Instagram today, but when we messaged them to inquire further, we received no reply.
Times have changed, however, and 2023 has seen the emergence of more inclusive, highly visible watch communities. Indeed, it may be a combination of working around Covid-19 restrictions and creating alternatives to traditional watch gatherings that spawned two of Hong Kong’s most prominent communities today – Watch Ho & Co., and The Horology Club.
“We were just a group of guys asking what we could do on the weekends with four people or less, and had to be home by 6pm,” remembers Watch Ho & Co. founder Jackie Ho. Around the end of 2021, the only place that the friends could meet was at members-only club Passage N, located on the 10th floor of the K11 Musea mall.
Ho ran his own private gatherings and oversaw a collaboration with the Digital Art Fair, until Clarence Cheung and Dixon Chin approached him near the end of 2022 to start something more formal together.
That resulted in the group’s official launch this May, when upwards of 100 people showed up from across the region to support, have drinks and talk watches. Since then, the group have maintained a mix of events large and small, ranging from brand visits from the likes of Bulgari and A. Lange & Söhne, to simple dinners.
Operating under the motto of “good vibes only”, approachability is the key to Watch Ho & Co. “No matter the value or quantity of your collection, as long as you come and want to meet like-minded people, see more watches and be in the company of people like you, you’re welcome,” Ho explains. “You can come to say as much or – because not everyone loves to speak – as little as you want.”
It seems inclusivity is sorely needed, as Ho had also faced issues when attempting to reach out to the longer-established watch gatherings such as Hong Kong Watch Club, which appears to be a more traditional, clandestine sort of community. “They meet in secret locations,” Ho says, “have cigars, hang out, without lectures or big events, and they were happy enough without trying to bring in newer members or outsiders.”
