Watch Me Campaign 2026: Shaping the Next Generation
As the Watch & Jewellery Initiative 2030 marks the close of its Watch Me. Shape the Next Generation campaign, the initiative reflects on a series of powerful conversations with leaders across the global watch and jewellery industry.
Launched in the lead-up to International Women’s Day 2026, the campaign brought together voices from across the sector to share personal reflections on leadership, responsibility and the legacy they hope to leave for the next generation.
Through interviews and reflections, industry leaders explored the lessons that shaped their careers and the role they believe businesses must play in advancing gender equality.
This year’s campaign intentionally highlighted both women leaders and male allies, recognising that progress on gender equality requires collective leadership. While women continue to face structural barriers to leadership and opportunity, those with influence across the industry also have a critical role to play in reshaping systems, policies and culture.
The stories shared throughout the campaign reflected a common message: creating a more inclusive industry requires visible leadership, structural change and sustained commitment.
For WJI 2030, this work sits within Pillar 3: Fostering Inclusiveness, which focuses on advancing gender equality and inclusive opportunity across the watch and jewellery industry and its global value chains. Through this pillar, WJI 2030 works with its members and partners to translate ambition into practical action through initiatives including:
- WEPs Activation: We ask all our members to sign the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) as a foundational step.
- WEPs Acceleration: Our efforts include delivering WEPs Capacity Building trainings and conducting awareness‑raising initiatives to strengthen organizational understanding of gender‑responsive practices across workplace, marketplace and community.
- Gender-Responsive Procurement: We have been actively working on Gender Responsive Procurement, with a focus on increased accountability and practical guidance to enable supplier engagement and training. A newly developed toolbox will include practical guidance on the business case, supplier engagement checklist, draft templates for contracts and codes of conduct, and a training toolkit template.
- WEPs Transparency & Accountability Roadmap: Gender equality metrics remain under-represented in reporting frameworks, so we have worked with UN Women on a new transparency and accountability roadmap. This roadmap is the result of an extensive cross-sector engagement with banking, food and beverage, watch and jewellery, fashion, and leading data rating agencies to ensure the guidance is both ambitious and practical, industry agnostic, and helps companies of all maturity levels and sizes measure, track, and report.
As the campaign concludes, WJI 2030 thanks the leaders who shared their experiences and insights, as well as the members, partners and stakeholders who continue to contribute to advancing inclusiveness across the industry.
Because true progress comes when all of us unite and action towards inclusive leadership across the value chain.
