“It’s hard to believe that the current clientele who are buying $50k or $150k watches will be too happy to see these floating around,” said Emmanuel Gueit. As the designer of the Royal Oak Offshore, which launched in 1993 and became one of the most commercially important watches in AP’s history, he would know. “Rather than pulling a stunt like this, the brand really needs to cherish and focus on their core clientele.”
The stunt: on Saturday, Swatch will begin selling the Royal Pop, a series of eight Bioceramic pocket watches in Lépine and Savonnette formats, powered by a hand-wound version of Swatch’s Sistem51 caliber and loosely based on AP’s Ref. 5691, the first Genta-designed Royal Oak pocket watch. They bear the Royal Oak’s octagonal bezel, exposed screws, and integrated lug geometry, and retail for $400 and $420. The design has belonged to Audemars Piguet since Gérald Genta drew it in 1972, and in the 54 years since, it has never been produced outside Le Brassus.
Photo: Swatch
When a commenter on the original MoonSwatch Instagram post asked “What’s next, a Swatch Royal Oak?”, the official AP account replied: “When do we launch?” That was 2022. Three years later, the collaboration is real, the product has leaked, and lines are already forming.
“AP is donating all the money they get to fund watchmaking, and they get a ton of free press and mindshare out of it. It’s brilliant,” said Eric Ku, collector and co-founder of Loupe This. “It was obvious from the onset that AP wouldn’t dilute the brand by making a plastic clone of their halo watch, and in pocket watch form I think this is really brilliant and fun. It’s a playful way to engage with younger audiences, and to plant seeds for the future.”
AP overtook Omega in the Morgan Stanley rankings last year, generating an estimated CHF 2.6 billion in revenue on roughly 53,000 watches, with the Royal Oak accounting for approximately 88% of that number. The company has said its entire share of Royal Pop proceeds goes to a watchmaking preservation and training initiative. AP isn’t structuring this as a revenue play. What the collaboration offers AP is something Le Brassus can’t manufacture on its own: reach.
Halim Trujillo, founder, editor-in-chief, and publisher of Watch Collecting Lifestyle, wasn’t as sanguine. “The Royal Pop is something categorically different and considerably more consequential. Audemars Piguet is an independent manufacture. No shared parent, no group allegiance, no corporate rationale that makes this an internal decision.”
For Trujillo, the issue isn’t the pocket watch format or the price point, but what the Royal Oak represented before Saturday.
“For decades, Audemars Piguet operated as one of the most daring materials laboratories in watchmaking, not just in the Royal Oak Offshore collection, but across the broader Royal Oak family,” he continued. “Tantalum in 1986. Forged carbon in 2007. Cermet in 2010. Bulk Metallic Glass in 2021. These were not marketing decisions. They were engineering commitments, each one a first for the industry, each one executed on a watch that collectors would spend years hunting. The Royal Oak has gone mass market, and AP’s brand equity goes with it.”
Adam Craniotes, founder of Red Bar Group, sees it differently.
“Aside from printing bags full of money, which this collaboration most certainly will do, it further cements Audemars Piguet as an ‘it’ watchmaker among the coveted 18-34 demographic. I have little doubt that it will pay dividends far down the line with a not statistically insignificant number of present Royal Pop customers becoming future Audemars Piguet customers as they ‘age in’ to their jobs and income, and recall their initial introduction to the grand maison fondly.”
The case for the Royal Pop rests almost entirely on the MoonSwatch playbook. By November 2022, eight months after launch, Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung more than a million units had sold. Morgan Stanley estimated the watch carried a 90% gross margin and generated roughly a fifth of Swatch Group’s operating profit that year. Hayek said Speedmaster sales at Omega’s own boutiques rose more than 50%.
Ku raised another point. “AP is well aware that people will be 3D printing bracelets for these things before long, and it will end up becoming an entire cottage industry. AP is a very smart company and anyone that thinks this is a marketing misstep is just wrong.”
The Swatch brand reported CHF 214 million in revenue in 2021. By 2023, Morgan Stanley put that figure at CHF 660 million, with the MoonSwatch accounting for roughly 73% of brand sales. Swatch jumped from 22nd to 13th in the LuxeConsult rankings, passing Jaeger-LeCoultre, TAG Heuer, and Tudor. Swatch Group doesn’t break out model-level numbers beyond Hayek’s initial disclosure, so everything after the first million is analyst math, but Morgan Stanley’s volume figures tell the story: 3.2 million units in 2021, 5.8 million in 2023, 4.9 million in 2024. By 2025 the brand had slipped to 15th, though before the MoonSwatch it sat outside the top 20 entirely.
Swatch Group’s net profit fell 89% in 2025, from CHF 219 million to CHF 25 million, driven largely by China, and on Tuesday an activist investor backed by ISS and Glass Lewis unsuccessfully challenged the Hayek family for a board seat for the second consecutive year. Swatch gets the product and the margin, AP gets the exposure.
“I’m so against it,” Gueit said, adding, “I’m sure it will do fantastic, but I don’t understand why they need to bring down the image of the company. It’s really disappointing. Even though some are getting really excited about it. Even before the official reveal I had friends reaching out to me asking if I could get them one.”
Alexandra Cheney contributed to this story.
