The girl who would one day build a business around fine timepieces once dreamed of cockpits and open sky — she wanted to fly planes. Life, as it turned out, had a different flight path in mind for Gweys Soriano.
That gap between the plan and the destination is where her story lives. The Filipina entrepreneur, now eleven years into her life abroad and based in Dubai, has built not one business but three: Watch Girl Dubai, an independent luxury watch sourcing and consulting venture; Decades Middle East, a personal styling and shopping consultancy; and KOBY — short for Keep On Being You — a fragrance brand she co-founded around the idea of authenticity. None of it was mapped out in advance. All of it, Gweys insists, was preparation she didn’t know she was getting.
The long way around
Before Dubai, before watches, before any of it, she was a journalism student building a career in Philippine media. She worked in print, then moved into the research and production side of TV Patrol, one of the country’s most-watched news programs. It was demanding work, and it left a mark. “The experience taught me discipline, curiosity, attention to detail, and the importance of understanding people’s stories,” Gweys shares with TGFM.
From media she moved into customer service, then into beauty and wellness — each shift a fresh start rather than a promotion up a familiar ladder. It was in the beauty industry that something clicked into place about what she was really selling. What people often seek is not simply a product, the former media researcher realized, but confidence, self-expression, and the feeling of becoming the best version of themselves.
Then she and her husband decided to move abroad, and the reinvention began in earnest. Her international career opened in hospitality and guest services with a U.S.-headquartered company serving clients from around the world, an environment that pushed her to adapt fast and connect across cultures. When she relocated to Dubai, Gweys kept climbing sideways — executive support, customer experience, luxury fashion, and finally fine watches.
The through-line wasn’t the industry. It was the people. “Although the industries were different, each role strengthened my understanding of people, service, and the importance of building trust,” she says.
A story worn on the wrist
Her path into watches came by way of fashion. A serious passion for style led the Filipina entrepreneur to formal training — professional certifications in personal shopping and styling, and intensive fashion studies at Central Saint Martins in London. Somewhere in that immersion she found a second, unexpected craft. “Along the way, I discovered another form of artistry, one measured not in fabric, but in time,” Gweys recalls.
Drawn to the history and engineering behind haute horlogerie, she earned certification from the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. What hooked her wasn’t the mechanics alone but what they carried. A watch, she found, could be both a mechanical marvel and a deeply personal object — an heirloom, a milestone, and a story worn on the wrist.
Today that fascination is the engine of Watch Girl Dubai, where Gweys helps clients acquire timepieces through a trusted network of collectors and industry professionals. Every watch has a story behind it, she points out, and every collector has a distinct reason for wanting the one they want. The appeal, for the luxury watch consultant, is the intersection of craftsmanship and feeling — the way an object built to keep time can also hold a memory.
Alongside the watches runs Decades, through which she conducts styling sessions, personal shopping experiences, and workshops for private groups and corporate clients. The two ventures look unrelated on paper, but Gweys treats them as the same work in different materials. Watching someone gain confidence in how they present themselves, she says, is just as rewarding as helping a collector land a meaningful piece.
Trust as the whole business
Ask her what she’s proudest of, and she doesn’t reach for a marquee sale or a celebrity client. Gweys points to something quieter and harder to manufacture. The greatest achievement, she says, is knowing that clients return, recommend her services to others, and place their confidence in her expertise.
That emphasis is earned. Establishing credibility across so many competitive fields meant she was constantly the newcomer, constantly proving herself before anyone would hand her a chance. There were stretches when the Filipina entrepreneur felt underestimated, when the good opportunities seemed reserved for people with deeper networks or longer résumés. Her response was to narrow her focus to what she could actually govern — her work ethic, her professionalism, her willingness to keep learning.
Every transition demanded she start from zero and win trust all over again. Moving from media to customer service, from customer experience to luxury fashion, and finally into fine watches, Gweys made herself a student each time. The lesson accumulated slowly and stuck: “credibility is not given, it is earned through consistency, knowledge, and results.”
The philosophy in the name
For someone whose career reads like a series of hard pivots, she’s remarkably at peace with the lack of a master plan. Gweys names the businesses that grew out of it — Watch Girl Dubai, Decades, KOBY — and talks about expanding the educational side of her work through workshops, speaking engagements, and mentorship. She wants to help more people make informed decisions about style, luxury purchases, and collecting, and she’s circling ideas around charitable work in education, still deciding where she can do the most good.
Her advice to fellow Filipinos abroad is grounded and unsentimental: guard your relationships, your reputation, and your money. She and her husband have been together more than two decades, and Gweys credits their endurance to treating life as a team sport. Professionally, she warns against burning bridges — the world is smaller than you think, especially overseas, and your reputation will often open more doors than your résumé. On money, the stylist is blunt about the trap of appearances. True financial freedom comes from discipline, not appearances, she says, and success shouldn’t be measured against what scrolls past on social media.
It all folds back into the name she gave one of her ventures. Keep On Being You started as a fragrance brand and became something closer to a creed. Media taught her communication, customer service taught her people, beauty taught her confidence, luxury fashion taught her curation, and watches taught her craftsmanship and value. At the time, none of it seemed to connect. Now Gweys can see the single thread running through all of it — understanding people, building trust, and helping them decide with confidence. “Sometimes the experiences that seem disconnected become the very things that make you unique.”
The pilot’s dream never materialized. What she got instead was a longer, stranger route — and, in the end, exactly the altitude she was after.
