A Growing Phenomenon: The Get-Together

You like your watches, am I right? And who doesn’t like getting together with a few like-minded friends over drinks. Who doesn’t like comparing notes, arguing finer points, and seeing what other geeks are geeking about?
Exactly.

That’s where a relatively new phenomenon comes in: The watch get-together.

Now really, I’m sure this has been going on for ages in one form or another. But a fairly recent trend has been sweeping Instagram: RedBar.

RedBar was started in New York City several years ago by two guys (Adam Craniotes and Jeffrey Jacques) meeting after work for drinks and to compare opinions on their wrist watches. The watering hole of choice was a bar called the Red Bar. Word spread and the small group grew. Recently, the brands have taken notice and occasionally show up. And The New York Times and CNN even took notice.

The actual Red Bar is gone now, but RedBar is still going strong. The New York RedBarCrew meets weekly in an undisclosed location (security, you see). And it’s not exclusive, but you have to know somebody to get invited.

With photos of sex piles (not what you think) and incredible individual pieces showing up on Instagram and Twitter, other groups have now sprung up. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – and nobody wants the boys in NYC to have all the fun either.

There are now regular get-togethers in Toronto, Nashville, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other places around the world (yep, there’s one in Amsterdam), meeting more or less monthly. Two guys first met on a frigid evening in a downtown bar & grille in Minneapolis in early 2014 and called it IceBar. The name didn’t stick. It’s RedBarMSP now. The guys running LA’s version call themselves the LA Watch Gang.

So go find a RedBar where you live, or get your buds together and start your own.