By
Bloomberg
Published
May 26, 2026
For Audemars Piguet chief executive officer Ilaria Resta, the response to the luxury Swiss timepiece maker’s launch of a pocket watch in collaboration with Swatch has been overwhelming. “Our website received more than 10 times the visitors that we have in a year in only one day,” Resta said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Tuesday.
The pocket watch, the result of a rare collaboration between mass manufacturer Swatch Group AG and Audemars Piguet, the maker of the exclusive Royal Oak, went on sale on May 16. The Royal Pop launch generated so much interest that some Swatch stores across the world had to shut down for crowd-safety concerns and in some cases couldn’t even open. The product was only available for purchase in stores. A secondary market frenzy dwarfed that of the 2022 MoonSwatch debut.
Resta urged buyers to be patient, saying the Royal Pop would remain on sale for several months- echoing a message from Swatch after it was forced to shutter around 20 of its 220 participating stores on launch day when mall operators proved unable to handle crowd volumes.
Audemars Piguet’s association with Swatch had surprised some in the industry since the exclusive watchmaker enjoys a strong reputation that’s built on scarcity. Audemars Piguet sold about 50,000 watches last year with a production capacity of an extra 20,000, according to a joint report by Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult. That compares to about 4.4 million for the Swatch brand, the report said.
Resta framed the collaboration as part of a broader push to court younger and first-time buyers at a moment of structural pressure on the industry. “Nobody needs a watch to tell the time,” she said. “We need to preserve this wonderful industry.”
She added that AP would donate collaboration proceeds to a fund supporting endangered watchmaking crafts, citing the loss of two-thirds of the industry during the quartz crisis as a cautionary parallel.
The frenzy around Royal Pop- a mechanical pocket watch priced at €385 ($448) for the Lépine model and €400 for the Savonnette- has come as makers of timepieces face a tough environment amid falling demand and geopolitical turmoil.
The push to buy the pocket watches mirrored the chaos around MoonSwatch’s March 2022 debut, Swatch said. Neither company has specified exactly how long sales will continue, and that deliberate ambiguity appears to be sustaining secondary market heat.
According to Chrono24, the world’s largest online luxury watch marketplace, daily requests on launch day reached 2.9 times the MoonSwatch peak of March 2022, and was the biggest demand event the platform has ever recorded. The average secondary market transaction price settled at €1,440 in the first days of trading, with 80% of sales falling between €1,100 and €1,850.
The halo effect extended well beyond the collaboration itself. Chrono24 reported Royal Oak demand on its platform rose 40% compared with the prior six-month average- notable given the Royal Oak sits at an entirely different price point. MoonSwatch requests surged 422% over the same period.
The black Royal Pop variant leads demand on Chrono24 by a clear margin, followed by pink and turquoise. The white variant commands the highest secondary prices despite ranking mid-table on request volume.
Chrono24’s head of brand engagement, Balazs Ferenczi, said the buyer profile underlined how far the collaboration had travelled outside the traditional watch community. “What stands out is how many of the buyers are entering the watch market for the first time,” he said.
