Royal Flop: the AP x Swatch Collab

The era of pocket-watch-shaped Labubus for grown men with disposable income has arrived.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, this past Saturday saw the closure of major Swatch stores worldwide because of the sheer bravoure of greedy customers wanting to get their five-fingered hands on the new — how shall we call it? Masterpiece? No. Overpriced Swatch? Not really, it’s not even a Swatch tbh. Pocket-watch-shaped Labubu for grown men with disposable income? Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s just settle on “materialistic indulgence” and move on. Despite the criticism (and there is a LOT), I must highlight that if this is the way for people to be introduced to one of the finest watchmaking houses on the planet, Audemars Piguet, then so be it. Welcome in. We have snacks.

For the uninitiated, the “Royal Pop” is the newborn child of Swatch and Audemars Piguet, launched on May 16, 2026 —the first time AP has ever licensed its sacred Royal Oak silhouette to anyone outside its own walls, and the first time Swatch has dared collaborate with a luxury brand it doesn’t actually own (FYI, Swatch owns Omega.

The collection is eight pocket watches in, priced between $400 and $420, hand-wound, and — wait for it — strung around your neck on a calfskin lanyard. Yes. A lanyard. The same delivery system as your gym locker key and your conference badge from that crypto summit you regret attending. Two Swiss icons came together, according to the joint press release, to “change the way we wear watches.” Mission accomplished, I guess, because nobody is wearing them — they’re dangling them.

Now, the chaos. Oh, the chaos. Swatch closed over 30 stores globally after their crowd control strategy revealed itself to be, essentially, hope. Police had to intervene in New York, Paris, and London. French cops fired tear gas in Paris. The whole spectacle had the dignity of a Black Friday Walmart riot, except everyone was wearing techwear and pretending they were there “for the craftsmanship.”

And here is where I lose my elegance. Swatch did this exact same thing in 2022 with the MoonSwatch. The same queues, the same scalpers, the same fistfights, the same Swatch employees standing behind the glass watching grown adults lose their humanity over Bioceramic. Chaos IS the campaign. Every viral video of someone getting tackled outside a mall is free advertising. Every closed store generates twelve think pieces. You don’t accidentally orchestrate a global frenzy twice — that’s a strategy, not a stumble.

Then there’s the resale market, which is where the real comedy begins. These $400 pocket watches are now listing on Chrono24 for up to $6,000, and one UK listing reportedly hit £16,000. Sixteen. Thousand. Pounds. For a hand-wound Bioceramic pocket watch on a lanyard. For that money, you can buy an actual pre-owned Royal Oak — you know, the wrist-mounted one, made by actual AP watchmakers, in actual steel, with a movement that doesn’t share a parts bin with a Swatch Sistem51. The flippers are eating well this week, and the people who waited in line for nine hours to buy one to “keep forever” are, statistically speaking, lying to themselves and their group chat.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: this is not a watch. This is a piece of merch. It is a luxury-coded keychain that happens to tell time, designed to be photographed, posted, and resold. AP, to their credit, picked a manual movement and is donating some proceeds to a watchmaking school, which is the horological equivalent of putting a “we donated to charity” line at the bottom of an oligarch’s press release. The Royal Oak became iconic in 1972 because Gérald Genta sketched something genuinely radical on a napkin the night before a Basel deadline. The Royal Pop will be remembered because someone got tear-gassed in front of a Sephora. These are not the same legacy.

So where does this leave us? Honestly, in a familiar place. The collab will sell out. The hype will subside. Resale prices will collapse by Q4, like they always do, and in eighteen months you’ll find Royal Pops at half-price on Chrono24 next to all the unsold Mission to Neptunes. Some of the people who got one will genuinely fall in love with mechanical watchmaking, walk into an AP boutique five years from now, and buy a real Royal Oak — and to those people, congratulations, the gateway drug worked as intended. The rest will sell, flip, and move on to the next manufactured scarcity event, whatever Swatch cooks up next. The AP x Swatch overpromised “a new way to wear time” and underdelivered a lanyard. But hey — they got us all talking. Including me. Especially me. Do I want one now?

Image Sources: (1) AI-generated; (2) Swatch; (3) Krisztian Elek/SOPA Images/Zuma Press