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.”
Dr. Albert “Al” Coombs, a dental implantologist in Washington, D.C., can relate. A lifelong watch lover and longtime collector, he helped spearhead the Detroit event, which was hosted by Official CP Time (the initials stand for Cultured Perspective), the watch group he and fellow collector C’Quon Gottlieb, now a luxury watch consultant in Miami, cofounded in December 2020 as a means to appreciate horology through the lens of Black culture.
With some 2,000 members around the country, CP Time regularly hosts events in cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The day after Coombs spoke to Robb Report, for example, he was flying to Dallas to preside over a CP Time event at the retailer La Fin Boutique, together with the brand Arnold & Son.
It’s a testament to the camaraderie of the Black collector community that Coombs and Dash—who met in 2022 at CP Time’s second anniversary party and reconnected shortly afterwards through a mutual friend, an anonymous collector who goes by the Instagram handle @FremStar—have become close friends. “One of the things I love about Perri is that we’ve created these spaces independently but there’s so much synergy, we’ve started to collaborate,” Coombs says, citing the Atlanta Watch Society as another frequent collaborator.
A recent event in Montreal, tied to the city’s annual Jazz Fest, is a perfect example. On June 27, Super Niche—Dash’s cultural storytelling platform, which now houses Wrist Check—and Official CP Time are co-hosting a party at Château d’Ivoire, a Rolex retailer located on the city’s Rue de la Montagne.
“They’re family-owned and operated,” Dash says. “They launched in the late ’70s, and the kids have since taken over the business. It’s pretty impressive. We’ll be hanging out with them. We’ve got a live jazz band coming through. Ulysse Nardin will be participating, and we’re talking to some other watch brands as well.”
Super Niche
Both Dash and Coombs emphasize that while they began their respective journeys in the watch community as storytellers and advocates for people of color, their events—much like those organized by Complecto, the N.Y.C. watch community founded in 2022 by the collector Jason Gong—attract a diverse crew of watch enthusiasts.
“The emphasis has been on making sure that people of color know that this is a safe space for them,” Dash says. “But everyone is invited. And if you’re someone who is part of the community, you like watches, but you also understand the importance of diversity, then this is the space for you because you know that everybody is welcome. We are not exclusionary in any way.”
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.”
What both men have found is that a funny thing happens when watch lovers get together—eventually, the watch talk fades as a deeper conversation takes hold.
“You end up veering off into life,” Dash says. “I look at watches, especially at these events, as the perfect icebreaker. They equalize the playing field. It doesn’t mean you have to have an expensive watch. I’ve been in situations where I might be wearing an obscure Seiko, and I’m sitting with a Patek collector, and he wants to know everything I know about this Seiko. And then it goes into, ‘What do you do? Who are you? Where are you from?’ And then you develop a friendship, and you end up talking about everything under the sun. It’s amazing.”
