Audemars Piguet's Swatch Collaboration: A Strategic Move for Future Collectors

Courtesy: Swatch

When the famed luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet announced a collaboration with Swatch last month, some Audemars collectors feared the worst.

Rapper DDG said he would sell his $180,000 Audemars Piguet if the collaboration grew too big and cheapened the brand. Members of the self-appointed horology community warned that one of the "Holy Trinity" of watch brands, famed for innovative complications, or features, and designs, had gone plastic.

Yet a few weeks after the launch of the AP-Swatch Royal Pop collection, AP prices have held steady on the secondary market. Despite predictions of a collapse in Audemars Piguet's brand value and exclusivity, experts say AP is still AP.

"There has been no discernible impact on AP prices from the launch," said Hamza Masood, head of partnerships at WatchCharts, which tracks secondary values for all major AP models.

It's early, of course, but Masood said Royal Pop, the collection of brightly colored watches on lanyards, is part of AP's longer-term strategy of attracting the next generation of collectors.

Courtesy: Swatch

AP's signature Royal Oak watches typically retail for more than $50,000 and have a multiyear waiting list. Royal Pop makes the brand accessible to younger buyers and more women.

"Fundamentally, everybody recognizes that this does not really eat into AP equity in any real, meaningful way," Masood said. "The product is not diluting the Royal Oak collector experience, because it's not even designed to be a wristwatch."

Still, AP faces some market challenges.

Secondhand watch sales

After a speculative bubble in luxury watches during the pandemic, the luxury watch market plunged in 2022 and is only now starting to stabilize.

WatchCharts' AP Index — comprising the top 30 models from the brand — is down about 40% from its peak in 2022. Rolex and Patek Philippe, the other two of the "Big Three" luxury watchmakers, are also down from their peaks.

In the first quarter, AP's secondary prices were up 2%, compared with an increase of 1.7% for Rolex and 3% for Patek, according to WatchCharts. AP's inventory is aging more than that of its peers, suggesting a larger mismatch between demand and supply.

"AP has [so far] not seen the same level of market recovery as the other two members of the Big Three," Masood said.

Still, he said the Royal Pop gave AP something even money can rarely buy: cultural buzz on social media and digital news. The burst of attention will spark interest among teens and 20-somethings, who one day will be able to afford a Royal Oak.

For a company that makes only about 50,000 watches a year — compared to more than a million a year for Rolex — and is still family owned, AP's investments are measured in decades rather than quarters or even years.

"The bet that they're making is all this collector teeth-gnashing may represent a loss of horological credibility, but in exchange, they're purchasing cultural credibility in front of a wider audience," Masood said. "I think they're purchasing more [cachet] in the long term."