Crushing crowds, police intervention, closed stores: Swatch’s Royal Pop release over the weekend became a spectacle, resulting in consumer concern, industry criticism, and likely losses for all involved.
Swatch, which collaborated with Audemars Piguet (AP) on the new line of pocket watches, experienced “challenges” with crowd control at about 20 of its stores worldwide, according to Reuters. WatchPro reported that Swatch decided not to open 15 U.S. stores on Saturday following problems in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. The New York Times quoted Swatch as saying it had closed over 30 stores and could not accommodate lines of more than 50 people at some locations.
Social media posts and news reports showed hundreds of people lined up outside stores and malls before opening time and then attempting to rush inside as soon as they could. ABC News said that police used pepper spray on a group of shoppers in New York City and that fights between customers broke out at a store in Milan. Bloomberg, People, Rolling Stone, and USA Today also covered the “frenzy,” as the Times called it.
Memes related to the product drop started circulating on social media, including an AI-generated picture of a baseball cap embroidered with the words “I got pepper sprayed at Swatch.” On Monday, some Swatch stores had signs up notifying the public that they were not selling the Royal Pop at that location. Wired labeled the launch “catastrophic.”
JCK reached out to Audemars Piguet for comment. AP deferred to Swatch, and Swatch replied with the same statement it had shared on Instagram: “To all our dear fans worldwide of our AP x Swatch collab, launched on May 16. The Royal Pop collection will remain available for several months. In some countries, queues of more than 50 people cannot be accepted, and sales may need to be paused.”
Swatch and Audemars Piguet had announced details of their collab on May 12 and made the pocket watches available for purchase on May 16. Royal Pop blends Swatch’s pop-art style with the octagonal bezel and other features of AP’s Royal Oak wristwatch. The watches are priced at $400 to $420 each.
Even before May 16, online resellers were already listing Royal Pop watches, at some ridiculous prices. The StockX website has offered a full set of Royal Pops in eight different colors for more than $20,000 and a single watch for $3,400. A pink Royal Pop was listed on eBay for $3,500, while Chrono24 had a green model for almost $12,000.
“It’s clear no one actually cares about the watch. They are all just trying to flip it and make a buck,” Washington, D.C., area watch dealer Kevin O’Dell tells JCK. “They’ll just be worn as ornaments and not really used to tell time.”
The watch brands, O’Dell says, “added insult to injury with the failed launch.” He did, however, laud AP’s choice of a manual watch movement for the Royal Pop, as well as its plan to donate some of the collection’s proceeds to a watchmaking school.
Several observers said Swatch should have been more prepared, especially after its much-hyped collaboration with Omega, the MoonSwatch, a few years ago.
“Swatch completely bungled the release, just as it did in 2022 with the MoonSwatch,” wrote Tony Traina on his watch collecting Substack, Unpolished. “They had to know what was coming, and either didn’t plan for the Royal Pop, or were willfully ignorant about how it might go down on May 16.
“For a few days, it was about the fun, accessible, colorful watches. But Swatch wanted more than that. They want the hype and spectacle, which is what they got,” Traina added. “MoonSwatch showed that the line between hype and a teenager getting punched is, sadly, thinner than we’d like to admit.”
“The mishandling of the Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop launch is inexcusable because it was so predictable,” WatchPro’s Rob Corder said in a Saturday column. “Swatch knew, having seen the reaction to the first MoonSwatch in 2022, that this was going to be an event that drew far bigger crows than they could serve in a day, even if they had supplied enough watches to each store.… This was entirely avoidable.”
Corder wrote, “Somebody could have been killed.” He concluded his column: “Heads should roll at Swatch.”
Top: Police control the crowd outside the Swatch store on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 16. (Photo: Franck Derouda/SIPA)
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