In 2013 Perri Dash walked into a J. Crew store in Manhattan and caught the eye of a store manager, Rashawn Smith.
Mr. Smith had noticed the exclusive Billionaire Boys Club cap that Mr. Dash was wearing (At the time, “you had to be in the know to get it,” Mr. Smith said of the hat by the cult fashion line by Pharrell Williams and Nigo). It didn’t take long for the men to realize they had a friend, and a fashion sensibility, in common.
In mid-July, Mr. Dash, 38, and Mr. Smith, 34, stood in front of the same building, now a Todd Snyder store, and posed for the Swiss watchmaker Blancpain. The brand was featuring the men, now co-hosts of the four-year-old “Wrist Check Podcast,” in a campaign promoting its newest dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms Tech.
That the shoot brought them full circle, to the spot where their friendship began, was not lost on Mr. Smith. “It was one of those moments where your life flashes before your eyes,” he said during a recent video call. “Where you look back and go, ‘I’ve built this.’”
He was referring to the podcast, but also to the community of watch enthusiasts that has sprung up around it. Since their first episode aired Nov. 10, 2021, the friends, both Black men from New York City’s outer boroughs, have joined the ranks of the luxury watch industry’s buzziest tastemakers.
“If I had to sum up the podcast in a word, it’d be ‘cool,’” said Eric Wind, the owner of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., a vintage watch dealer and one of the show’s former guests.
Mr. Dash and Mr. Smith — along with another friend, Ashraf Rashid, 42, a music producer from Brooklyn who works behind the scenes — have hosted events, partnered with brands and are developing “Super Niche,” an Anthony Bourdain-style luxury lifestyle video series that they hope will debut next year. It all has happened under the banner of a media company, also called Super Niche, which Mr. Dash co-founded in 2024 with Michael Williams, a business associate in Washington, D.C.
The heart of their storytelling platform, however, continues to be “Wrist Check Podcast” — or “Wrist Check Pod,” as most people know it. That is where Mr. Dash and Mr. Smith interview a rotating cast of personalities who share their interest in horology, but also in music, fashion, art and travel. Guests have included N.O.R.E., the hip-hop rapper and co-host of the music podcast “Drink Champs”; Ben Clymer, the founder of the watch platform Hodinkee; and lesser-known collectors.
“These are people who might not have a lot of followers, but if you go to watch events and they’re there, everyone knows who they are,” Mr. Dash said during a mid-July interview in Los Angeles, where he was traveling on business. “They’re important to the community. And I feel like that reinforces the things that people love about us, especially the authenticity. It’s not just about celebrities or big brands. We highlight the people who are entrenched in this.
“You don’t have to have a collection of Patek Philippe to be on the show,” he added. “It’s great if you do, but we’ve met people who have obscure Seiko collections and people want to hear about that. In a field that even five, six years ago, would have felt inaccessible — and still does to some people — I think we make them feel comfortable. Just being here gives people courage to go to a watchmaker.”
Marc A. Hayek, the president and chief executive of Blancpain, is one of many watch executives who have taken notice. “I was introduced to ‘Wrist Check Podcast’ by my team, who flagged it early on as something different,” Mr. Hayek wrote in an email. “What I discovered was a fun and passionate duo with a lot of watchmaking knowledge, bringing a new kind of energy into the watch world.”
He said Mr. Dash and Mr. Smith have captured the casual side of watch collecting in a way that made sense for the times. “Traditional collectors often focus on watch scarcity and resale value,” Mr. Hayek wrote. “This growing community values emotional resonance. Perri and Rashawn have created a space where someone wearing a Swatch and someone with a Fifty Fathoms can share a table and a conversation.
“That shift is powerful,” he continued. “It’s not about lowering standards, it’s about widening the lens.”
At first, the podcast attracted mostly hard-core watch people, acquaintances who were mostly white. “But we knew that if we came into this space earnestly and selflessly, people that look like us were going to follow,” Mr. Smith said.
Claudio Terjanian, the president of the Americas at the Swiss watchmaker H. Moser & Cie., said that has been happening. “They brought a spotlight into watch collecting and also created a platform for people of color to pick up the hobby,” he said. “There aren’t too many people like Rashawn and Perri out there, but you’re starting to see more. They’re making watch collecting less intimidating and definitely cooler.”
But people familiar with the show said the duo’s take wouldn’t work if it wasn’t backed up by expertise, which they both developed working in watch retail. The men were colleagues for about a year at the Watches of Switzerland boutique in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, and Mr. Smith now works in sales at a large watch retailer in Midtown.
Pints to Podcast
To understand the trajectory of their success, think back to pandemic-era New York City, circa August 2021.
Mr. Dash and Mr. Smith were both employed downtown — at Ralph Lauren and Watches of Switzerland, respectively. After work, they would meet up with Mr. Rashid at Fanelli Cafe, a historic Soho bar, to catch up over beers and burgers. The conversation inevitably lingered on watches.
“I was consuming a lot of watch content online: Teddy Baldassarre, Andrew Morgan, Hodinkee,” Mr. Dash said. “But then, there was another podcast I was into: the Joe Budden Podcast. I thought there was something unique about his show: He and his co-hosts were friends, and it was casual — them on a couch in his apartment.
“That was really appealing to me,” he added. “There are plenty of people making content about watches from a heritage or technical perspective. But that casual approach didn’t exist in this space.”
After discussing it with his wife, Mr. Dash suggested that they all start a watch podcast — in video form, like Joe Budden’s. (Another co-host, Benjamin Grullon, left the show last year.)
In describing his idea, Mr. Dash told his friends, “’The only way this works long-term is if you can get people just moderately interested in watches to tune in.’”
Mr. Rashid, a relative newcomer to the watch world, recognized himself in that group. “Prior to this, if someone were to approach me and ask me about watches or say, ‘You want to come to a watch meet?’ I wouldn’t have known how to envision that,” he said in a recent interview. “But what we try to do is create a space where it’s all-inclusive and people have fun.”
The podcast is available via all the major platforms — YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Instagram — but the men recently signed a licensing and distribution deal with Revolt, a music-oriented digital cable TV network. The video podcast, which the men said will be the first watch-based show on cable, is scheduled to debut Sept. 15.
Momentum Grows
Pierre Biver, the creative director of the high-end brand Biver, came across the podcast in late 2023 and invited Mr. Dash, Mr. Smith and Tomas Aksamit, Super Niche’s creative director, to join a press event in mid-2024 in Geneva.
“The watch world has spoken mainly to an established audience, but the future of watchmaking depends on reaching people who connect with watches in fresh and personal ways,” Mr. Biver wrote.
Looking back on the five days they spent with Mr. Biver and his father, Jean-Claude Biver, a former chief executive at TAG Heuer and a watch marketing legend, both Mr. Dash and Mr. Smith waxed poetic.
“It was surreal,” Mr. Smith said. “To sit down with someone that has done amazing things for horology and have him say, ‘I’m a fan of yours’ — it was like, ‘How could that be? I’ve done nothing and you’re the reason why anybody has these crazy ideas.’”
Since that trip, the collaborations have continued to mount. In April, at the Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva, “Wrist Check Pod” and Super Niche partnered with the Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin to host a BBQ party at a winery, with about 50 collectors and influencers coming along.
The same easygoing vibe prevailed in June in Montreal, where Super Niche co-hosted an event with the collectors’ group Official CPTime at the Rolex retailer Château d’Ivoire. By all accounts, the formula is working — or so a recent encounter between Mr. Rashid and a longtime acquaintance would suggest.
“Just the other day, I was speaking to one of my neighbors, and I was telling him that I just came back from Montreal and was doing some watch stuff up there,” he said. “And he was like, ‘Oh, really? I’m a watch guy.’
“I told him I have a podcast called ‘Wrist Check.’ He’s like, ‘I know that show.’ He’s known me my whole life. The fact that this show has gotten to a point where my neighbor is watching, he knows Rashawn’s name, he knows Perri — it’s awesome.”
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