A $400 Swatch Watch Is Driving Fans Insane
A collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet generated surprising hype—and fierce debate
Earlier this week, when the Swiss watch brands Swatch and Audemars Piguet announced a collaboration, many fans were hoping that they would get an affordable version of a legendary style. Some speculated that a riff on the iconic Royal Oak was on the way.
What they got instead was a rainbow-colored pocket watch.
The Royal Pop pocket watch, revealed on Tuesday, has a multicolor body complete with a lanyard. It went on sale at Swatch stores on Saturday, at a starting price of $400. (A version with a seconds subdial runs for $420.)
News of the release generated significant hype, alongside fierce debate over the design. Still, people lined up days in advance to get their hands on the pocket watches. Representatives for Swatch and Audemars Piguet declined interview requests.
In recent years, Swatch has captured attention with limited-edition products made in partnership with luxury makers Omega and Blancpain—versions of those brands’ iconic pieces rendered in Swatch’s colorful Bioceramic material. Priced in the low-to-mid hundreds, the watches appealed to both longtime collectors and total newbies. They also held significant value on the resale market, with some listed online for nearly $1,000.
But even with those collaborations, some fans still saw a partnership between Swatch and Audemars Piguet—whose pieces can command six figures—as pie-in-the-sky. “One of the dream ones was always, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they did something with the Royal Oak?’” said Tony Traina, the writer of the watch newsletter Unpolished, referring to Audemars Piguet’s flagship model. “And it was always, like, ‘Yeah, but that would never happen.’”
When Swatch began teasing its partnership with Audemars Piguet, eagle-eyed fans went down watch-history rabbit holes. Keen observers knew that in the 1980s Swatch released a line of “Pop” watches that could be removed from their frames and affixed to bags or jackets. “Something like what they came out with was kind of always the reasoned or informed opinion of what would be coming,” Traina said.
That didn’t stop frenzied corners of the internet from using AI to conjure images of a hoped-for model: an affordable ceramic version of the Royal Oak wristwatch. Some, on seeing the images, complained that their Royal Oaks—often starting at $30,000 on the secondary market—would be devalued.
Zoë Abelson, who sources and sells watches through her company Graal, noticed that Swatch-AP content took over her Instagram feed, which was normal enough, given her profession. Less normal? “The amount of messages that I received from friends who are not into watches, just wanting to speculate and talk about it and ask me what I think it is, was pretty incredible,” she said.
It was one thing, said Joshua Ganjei, CEO of the Boston watch retailer European Watch Company, when Swatch collaborated with Omega and Blancpain—luxury brands, to be sure, but corporate siblings under the Swatch Group umbrella. “Now you’re talking about the Swatchification of a Holy Trinity watch, and that changes things,” he said, using the watch-obsessive term for pieces from Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.
Early birds began lining up outside the Swatch store in Times Square nearly a week before the new pocket watches were released.
“We’ve been here since Sunday. After Mother’s Day, we came here,” Arvey Valderrama, 35, said on Thursday from a folding chair set up snugly against the Swatch shop’s exterior, where a hundred or so others were waiting in line.
On Tuesday, after Swatch and Audemars Piguet released official photos of the pocket watches, a number of folks decided they were no longer interested, according to people who stayed in the line.
Rodney Smalls, 28, kept his place in line. “It’s AP—so anyway it goes, it’s a smart investment,” said Smalls on Thursday, using an abbreviation for Audemars Piguet.
Buyers of the new pocket watch are limited to purchasing one per store per day. Potential resellers said they hoped to get anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000.
Smalls said that if he got a watch, he would hold onto it for a while, betting that it would appreciate. If he were to never sell it, or if he is able to snag a second, he is hoping that Swatch will eventually release a wristband that he’d be able to pop the pocket watch into.
But that wasn’t a dealbreaker for Smalls. Since he often wears a suit for his security work, he said, “I would actually wear it as a pocket watch.”