Editor’s Note
This article traces the origins of the renowned Baselworld fair, highlighting its evolution from the 1917 Swiss Sample Fair to its formal establishment in 1973. It underscores the deep historical ties between the event and Switzerland’s watchmaking industry.
The Baselworld watch and jewelry fair, which last took place in 2019, existed since 1973. However, its roots go back much further. In April 1917, the Swiss Sample Fair (muba) was held for the first time in Basel, where various industrial and commercial companies presented their new products. In 1925, the Swiss Sample Fair Cooperative specifically invited watch manufacturers for the first time to present their products in the provisional halls on the Basel exhibition grounds. In 1931 – three years after the construction of the first permanent exhibition hall – watch companies exhibited for the first time in their own pavilion under the name “Swiss Watch Fair” as part of the muba.
It was not until the early 1970s that the event’s national character changed towards an international trade fair. The consequence: in 1973, the European Watch and Jewelry Fair (EUSM) with exhibitors from numerous European countries took place for the first time within the muba. It was not until 1984 that the EUSM emancipated itself from the parent event muba and took place as an independent fair, exclusively featuring watch and jewelry companies and their suppliers. In 1995, there was another name change to “Basel 95 – The World Watch, Clock and Jewellery Show”.
What we always refer to as Baselworld when looking back at the trade fair events of the past decades actually only bore this name since 2003. Despite the mentioned departures of exhibitors, the 2000s were a highly successful time for the fair, whose exhibitor and sales numbers now grew constantly. In this peak phase, Baselworld counted well over 1,000 exhibitors from the watch, jewelry, and gemstone industries; in 2015, there were around 1,400.
Due to constantly rising exhibitor costs – for example, since the expensive new construction, top brands in the main hall had to build significantly larger stands – discontent spread among watch manufacturers in the following years, leading to numerous cancellations for 2018. Among other things, due to further departures to the Geneva watch salon SIHH, but also due to the own marketing activities of many manufacturers that completely replaced the trade fair appearance, the number of exhibitors shrank by about half to 650. The losses amounted to about 200 million Swiss francs.
Simultaneously, the world’s largest watch group, Swatch Group, announced its withdrawal from Baselworld for 2019, which literally tore a huge hole in the middle of Hall 1. Although the fair management planned cleverly to fill the freed-up space, the airy new layout clearly showed that the number of exhibitors in 2019 had drastically dropped again to 500 due to the absence of the Swatch Group and numerous other companies. The 2019 edition was the last Baselworld. The former leading trade fair for the watch industry has since been succeeded by Watches and Wonders in Geneva.