Will Swatch x Audemars Piguet Help or Hurt Luxury Watches?

By Karen Dybis | May 12, 2026

The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop announcement has fired up the watch world, with horological experts debating not only what will happen with the May 16 product drop but the impact of the partnership on both brands.

In an Instagram post today, Swatch said Royal Pop will be a collection of eight pocket watches uniting Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak model and Swatch’s Pop watches, introduced in the 1980s. “At the core of this collection is another world first: a brand-new version of our signature SISTEM51 movement, reimagined as a hand-wound caliber and finished with a dash of Pop Art,” Swatch wrote. “And to top it all off the watches are available in one of two unique styles: Lépine and Savonnette.”

Over the weekend, Swatch had teased the Royal Pop release on Instagram, calling its Audemars Piguet (AP) collaboration “disruptive” and a mix of “joyful boldness and positive provocation.”

“Two Swiss icons come together to reimagine a complete new way to wear time and bring future generations to the world of mechanical watches,” Swatch wrote in the May 9 post.

That post quickly went viral, gaining more than 350,000 likes—along with over 7,000 comments. One of the most critical responses came from Kevin O’Dell, a Washington, D.C., area watch dealer and collector, who commented “RIP” with a tombstone emoji.

Swatch posts AP — *Instagram watch accounts have jumped on the Swatch x Audemars Piguet collaboration, sharing hot takes as well as possible prototypes.*

“While this will certainly popularize Audemars Piguet to the masses, make no mistake: It lessens the overall perception of the brand,” O’Dell tells JCK. “The whole point of luxury is to be inaccessible. It’s literally in the definition. The entire culture surrounding these heritage brands is completely at odds with that very heritage. They seem to value short-term hype over long-term legacy.

“A cheap plastic toy that has simply been licensed does not fulfill any dream or desire to own an Audemars Piguet,” O’Dell says, “because, quite frankly, it isn’t an Audemars Piguet by any reasonable measure or standard.”

Royal Pop is Swatch’s first outside collaboration; the brand previously worked with Swatch-owned watchmakers Omega (on the MoonSwatch) and Blancpain (Fifty Fathoms).

In Chrono24’s Monthly Dial marketplace report posted May 12, Balazs Ferenczi, the online watch platform’s head of brand engagement, said, “I cannot remember a collaboration of this kind in the industry before, with a holy trinity brand entering the Swatch format for the first time.

“The closest reference point we have is the original MoonSwatch in 2022, which lifted demand for the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch on our marketplace by around 85% in the weeks after launch. The short-term effect was clearly visible, even if a lasting structural shift is always harder to measure. With the Royal Oak, we are in entirely new territory.”

But O’Dell tells JCK, “You cannot compare this to Omega. Omega has a very different heritage and ethos than Audemars Piguet. They also have a much lower entry level and much higher production than AP, so it makes more sense for them to want to appeal to the masses.… I don’t quite understand the incentive for AP.”

Other online reaction to the Royal Pop announcement ranged from gleeful to glum. “Every AP owner will say huge mistake and every AP dreamer will say -oh so great,” Shankar Iyer commented on a post by watch collectors group Fine Hour Club. “Horrendous move by AP. Will be brilliant for Swatch but will destroy brand equity of AP,” Andrew Roberts wrote in the comments on a Watch Advisor post.

On LinkedIn, Academy of Luxury senior business development manager Jonathan Ho penned a lengthy essay titled “The Plastic Menace: What the Swatch x AP ‘Crisis’ Says About Luxury Watch Culture,” chastising watch collectors for being “gatekeepers” who discourage mass appeal for luxury timepieces.

“If you are worried about the Royal Pop, I suggest you ask yourself: What am I actually defending? If the answer is, ‘my watch’s value,’ you may need to examine whether you bought the watch or whether the watch bought you,” Ho said. “If anything, the Swatch creates new entry points into the AP obit, seeding future customers.

“Let’s be clear about what is actually happening: a Swiss watch conglomerate with a playful, democratizing brand philosophy has announced a colorful, accessible, bioceramic reinterpretation of the most coveted sports-luxury watch on Earth. And the internet loses its collective mind. Again.”

In separate Swatch news, the company announced on Tuesday that at its general shareholders meeting, Andreas Rickenbacher, a Swiss business economist who was a member of the Bern cantonal government from 2006 to 2016, was elected to its board of directors. For the second year in a row, shareholders rejected board representation by Steven Wood, who has lobbied to join its board to represent small investors.

Top: An image from Swatch’s May 9 Instagram post teasing its Royal Pop collaboration with Audemars Piguet (photo courtesy of Swatch)