Asher Rapkin, co-founder of Collective Horology, a watch retailer in Ventura, Calif., stood in the middle of a room heaving with watch lovers. It was still early in the day, but the event—Collective’s third annual Open House, which took place in early June at the Aster, a private members club in Hollywood—already had people queuing at the entrance downstairs, patiently waiting for their chance to speak to a cohort of independent watchmakers they might never cross paths with otherwise.

Rapkin, truth be told, looked a little dazed. “It’s wild,” he told Robb Report. “As a business owner, you start something and you don’t know if anyone will come.” He glanced around—first at the crowd of people surrounding the table occupied by the brand Ming, co-founded by Malaysian watchmaker Ming Thein, then to the horde of men (the vast majority of attendees were men) at the nearby Fleming table—and tried to make his voice heard above the din.

“It’s bonkers,” he said.

Rapkin may as well have been talking about the buzz surrounding the indie watch scene. It is bonkers. And nowhere was that more obvious than in this room, where virtually all 14 exhibiting brands were swarmed with prospective buyers. (Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, Collective’s other co-founder, estimated the attendance at around 500.)

Logan Baker, the former Hodinkee editor and Phillips editorial manager now heading marketing and communications for Ming from his adopted home of Geneva, was so busy, he barely had time to look up. The brand was showing its new 37.06 Lightning watch, a collaboration with the California maker J.N. Shapiro featuring a pure titanium dial engine-turned by Josh Shapiro and his team on a traditional rose-engine lathe in Los Angeles.

In the adjacent room, the Shapiro team was equally besieged. They were giving attendees a sneak peek at their new Radiant monopusher chronograph, officially introduced this week. A new addition to the brand’s Infinity Series, the model comes in a 38 mm tantalum case in two dial executions—one featuring a meteorite face and another with a meteorite guilloche sub-counter.

The new Radiant wasn’t the only watch at the Open House fashioned from tantalum, a weighty blue-gray metal best known for the terror it inspires in machinists and case makers who know how difficult it is to work with. Fleming showed a piece, the Series 1 Mark II, crafted from the material, which has lately been trending among luxury watchmakers. (Incidentally, Fleming was the only exhibiting brand not represented by Collective. “We invited them because they’re part of the Alternative Horological Alliance,” Rapkin said, “so they’re good friends with Fears, Ming, and Shapiro, and we want to support that group.”)

At the Armin Strom table, a man in a “Japangeles” hat was getting a lesson on GMT functionality from co-founder Claude Greisler, who’d traveled from the brand’s headquarters in Bienne, Switzerland, to attend the Open House and see clients on the West coast. When Greisler showed off Armin Strom’s new $505,000 minute repeater—the first to combine a resonance movement—collector Terri Hubert of Seal Beach took notice.

“The more I get into watches the more I like the independents,” said Hubert, who wore a watch by Trafford Watch Co., an Austin, Texas-based brand founded by the British designer Nathan Trafford.

She’d come to the Open House specifically to meet Michiel Holthinrichs, an independent watchmaker from Delft, Netherlands, who was drawing considerable attention for his 3D-printed titanium cases. Trained as an architect, the up-and-comer designed his first watch in 2012 while still a student. “I bought broken watches during my studies, learned to repair them, and learned to make parts, eventually with a simple grinder,” he told Robb Report.

Reilly, doubling as the event photographer, said he and Rapkin first met Holthinrichs at the Grand Duke Pub in Geneva, their unofficial headquarters in Switzerland. And that, in a roundabout way, was the point. The reason why the independent personalities Collective has championed since its founding in 2018 as a watch enthusiast club are so hot right now is because they offer collectors something that’s very difficult to get with the big brands: accessibility—not to mention a chance to become part of their stories.

The excitement over those opportunities was palpable in an exchange that Rapkin had with the producer Alexander Woo, one of the show runners behind Netflix’s Three Body Problem. (Yes, we eavesdropped.) Woo told Rapkin he was flying to Europe the next day to film the show’s third season—though, by the sound of it, he was more excited about a side trip to Glashütte, the heart of Germany’s watchmaking industry.

Grady Seale, another collector, was among a handful of people from Northern California who’d ventured south for the Open House. Seale, the head of design technology at Apple, wore a Czapek in steel with a turquoise dial. Was the event worth the schlep? Rapkin ventured a guess: “It’s a heck of a lot closer than Geneva,” he said.