Off Kilter 223: Audemars Piguet and Bentley.
tl;dr: Two very different luxury collaborations.
Last Saturday, police deployed pepper spray on a crowd outside a mall in Long Island. In Paris, it was tear gas. This wasn’t some kind of coordinated protest; people were going mental over a $385 pocket watch.
If you’ve been living under a rock, the watch in question is The Royal Pop, a collaboration between Audemars Piguet and Swatch that launched globally on May 16. Eight plastic bioceramic pocket watches with Pop Art colorways, a lanyard, and a hand-wound mechanical movement. By Sunday, verified resale prices on Chrono24 were approaching $6,000 (although they’ve been dropping since). One idiot buyer reportedly paid over $25,000 for the full set of eight on StockX.
Within hours of the launch, watch influencers loudly proclaimed that AP had made a catastrophic error. They’d Hublot’d themselves. Brand dilution. Cheapening the iconic Royal Oak model. The beginning of a catastrophic end for the brand.
I dunno. It’s hard to agree with them, to be honest. AP has been on an incredible run of success and isn’t prone to making catastrophic strategic errors. So let’s take a clearer-eyed and less algorithmically hyped perspective and try to unpack why this collaboration, why now, and what's next.
Let’s start with what the data says about Audemars Piguet.
In 2025, AP grew revenue 9% to CHF 2.6 billion ($3.3bn at current exchange rates) on the sale of 53,000 watches. The average price exceeded CHF 51,000 ($65,000) per piece. It overtook Omega in the Swiss watch rankings for the first time and has quadrupled revenue since 2012, mostly on the strength of a single design — the Royal Oak — which has barely changed since 1972. The entry-level Royal Oak Selfwinding sells for circa $40k at retail and trades at a substantial premium on the secondary market because the waitlist to get one is years-long.
This is not a brand in trouble. It’s one of the best-performing luxury brands on earth. So why collaborate with Swatch on a $385 product?
The AP/Swatch collaboration is the first time Swatch has done a high-low crossover with a brand outside its own portfolio. When Swatch launched the MoonSwatch with Omega in 2022, it was an internal transaction. Swatch owns Omega. The Scuba Fifty Fathoms with Blancpain, same deal. Swatch owns Blancpain. These collaborations were essentially a single conglomerate playing with its own portfolio.
AP, by contrast, is independent. Family-owned since 1875. Nobody upstairs told them they had to do this. They chose it. And they donated 100% of their proceeds to watchmaking education and the preservation of the craft. So, it’s not a revenue play. Well, not directly, anyway. More on that in a sec.
CEO Ilaria Resta referred to it as “a megaphone.” A device to ignite collective desire for mechanical watchmaking. A singular, one-off event. Done for the industry, not for itself.
Maybe. But, I’m not convinced. Taken at face value, that seriously smacks of hubris. AP may be a highly aspirational brand, but is it really going to broadly “ignite collective desire for mechanical watch making” against a backdrop of watch wearing collapsing from circa 46% of wrists in 2020 to just 26% today?
What’s more interesting is why a winning, family-owned, and genuinely independent brand that expertly wields scarcity as a value mechanism would choose to voluntarily put its most iconic design on a $385 plastic pocket watch on a lanyard sold in a Swatch store. I don’t think altruistic megaphone is what’s really going on at all.
To get at what might actually be happening, let’s start with Swatch, because it needed this far more than AP did.
In 2024, Swatch Group operating profit fell 75% to CHF 304 million. Net income collapsed from CHF 1.19 billion to CHF 219 million. In 2025, things got worse. Greater China, which once accounted for over a third of group sales, is down over 30%. Activist investors are howling. The current board faces genuine governance pressure for the first time in decades.
Swatch needed another hit like the MoonSwatch. And they could bring something AP almost certainly needed to do this deal: a proven playbook.
MoonSwatch data is compelling. Sales of the real-deal Omega Speedmaster moonwatch rose more than 50% after the March 2022 launch, while the full Speedmaster lineup grew sales by double digits. Morgan Stanley estimates roughly 2 million MoonSwatches have been sold, helping jump Swatch back into the top 15 of the Swiss brand league table. Critically, and this is the number the AP board probably loved the most, Omega prices went up after the MoonSwatch launch, not down. The Speedmaster became more desirable, enabling Omega to make it more expensive.
I’m guessing the argument made to AP was pretty simple: here’s what happened to Omega. Here’s what that means for AP.
The odd part, though, is that AP isn’t Omega. The aspiration-to-conversion ladder for Omega is a lot more obvious: a meaningful percentage of two million people queuing up to buy a $260 MoonSwatch will plausibly be able to own a $7,800 Speedmaster within a few years of career progression. AP’s mechanical entry point, on the other hand, is circa $30k and rising. Its distribution is boutique-only. Its waitlists are relationship-based. The Royal Oak’s entire cultural logic is that you cannot simply buy one. The scarcity is the product.
This is almost certainly why the watch-world engaged in a collective tantrum, and where the risk in this move appears to lie. Within hours of launch, the watch forums, Reddit, Hodinkee comment sections, and YouTube were full of very serious people explaining with great solemnity why AP had gone insane and destroyed itself. Comparisons to Hublot were everywhere.
The thing is, though, insiders always oppose change because they have the most to lose, and they appear to fundamentally misunderstand AP’s position.
The Hublot comparison is particularly sloppy. Hublot’s collector problem has nothing to do with collaborative democratization of a price point. It’s about perceived design plagiarism of the Royal Oak and Nautilus, about claims of five-figure watches running modified commodity movements, and about marketing itself as a celebrity-event brand rather than watchmaker. AP, by contrast, enters this collaboration with 150 years of in-house manufacture, unimpeachable horological credibility, and the strongest independent brand narrative in Swiss watchmaking. If Royal Pop is genuinely a one-off and Royal Oak supply stays constrained, Hublot is the wrong comparison entirely.
Here’s a better one. If Stella McCartney does a collaboration with H&M, it doesn’t catastrophically destroy the value of her bespoke pieces. Why? Because consumers aren’t stupid. They know Stella McCartney designs made in partnership with H&M aren’t really Stella McCartney. They’re H&M. The Royal Pop is exactly the same. It’s not an AP. It’s a Swatch with an AP logo, designed in partnership with AP.
We really need to stop treating consumers as if they’re stupid. They might be greedy for resale value, but they’re not stupid; in fact, when it comes to brands, consumers are pretty damned sophisticated.
Here’s my bet. This has less to do with democratization and more to do with pricing. Selling thousands of plastic pocket watches will probably do nothing to devalue a real Royal Oak and everything to make it more desirable. The most likely result? Prices go up, while the waitlist increases. The Royal Pop creating greater salience among a younger generation of wealthy individuals because owning the real thing now confers, rather than removes, credibility among their peers.
What the watch intelligentsia seems to entirely miss in their howls of insanity is that looking a bit nuts is entirely in keeping with AP’s institutional character. The Royal Oak itself was considered borderline insane upon launch in 1972. A stainless steel watch priced higher than a gold Patek Philippe, with exposed screws and an industrial bracelet, at a moment when the watch world was retreating into conservative elegance. While the establishment hated it, it went on to define an entirely new category and save the company. AP has form here. Making moves counter to the received wisdom isn’t a departure from its DNA. It is its DNA.
And here’s something else the hand-wringers are missing. AP can afford to be wrong. They’ve already sold every watch they’ll make until 2030. If Royal Pop turns out to be a dud, it’ll be a footnote by the time the last Royal Oak on that waitlist is delivered. When you can afford to fail, you naturally make bolder bets. In this context, the Royal Pop isn’t reckless. It’s the opposite. It’s a calculated gamble from a brand so secure in its position that it can afford to look insane for a week.
The timing is also fascinating, as the luxury status of analog, “dumb” objects is about to explode.
Let’s contrast a Royal Oak to an Apple Watch. In practical terms, the Royal Oak is utterly obsolete. No step counts. No sleep tracking. No dentist appointment reminder. Just 18th-century engineering wrapped around your wrist as an act of deliberate, expensive uselessness. And the uselessness is the point.
Someone wearing a $40,000 Royal Oak communicates that they’re so rich, so successful, that they’re liberated from the tyranny of optimization. They don’t need to be alerted. They’re not managed by their schedule. They own time rather than being owned by it. A watch that can’t connect to anything is rapidly becoming a powerful status signal. Because the people rich enough and free enough to wear one are rare.
Put more simply, the more smart devices that appear, the more they’re imbued with AI and intelligence, and the more they optimize the wearer’s life for maximum productivity, the scarcer and more desirable the sheer uselessness of a mechanical movement becomes.
We’re entering a world where intelligence is a commodity. Within five years, AI-driven optimization, personalization, prediction, and automation will be ambient, surrounding us in every object, every surface, every interaction, at minimal marginal cost.
In this world, things that aren’t automated will become scarce and valuable. A watch assembled by hand in a Vallée de Joux workshop by someone with thirty years of experience finishing micro-components that are invisible to the naked eye. The shoe made by a cordwainer in Northampton who knows your last from memory. The dinner where a maître d’ knows your name and decides what you’re having tonight, because they know you well enough to know what you like better than you know yourself.
Against the backdrop of ambient intelligence, the embrace of the analog won’t just be a signal of wealth but also of an elevation above the plebeian drudgeries of the modern world.
AP almost certainly understands this, even if it hasn’t articulated it in these terms. A brand that has been owned by the same two families for 150 years thinks in generations, not quarters. So, the strategic question it’s answering isn’t “what do our buyers want in 2026?” Because they’ve already sold every watch they’ll make until 2030. Nope, it’s “who’s going to be wearing a mechanical watch in 2040, and how do we make sure they’re AP buyers?”
The Royal Pop has tapped into latent desire on a global scale among a generation that largely has no prior exposure to mechanical watchmaking. The riots, the resale premiums, the sold-out colorways, the global media coverage, all communicate one thing: this object has cultural gravity. The Royal Oak octagon means something to people who will never own one.
And that meaning, the breadth of desire, is exactly what will justify the next price increase on the real thing. And the one after that. Scarcity becoming more valuable the wider the gap between desire and access becomes. Royal Pop doesn’t close this gap. It widens it by expanding the desire side of the equation. Meanwhile, access to the real thing remains constrained. This is the opposite of democratization.
And it’s strategically savvy. In truth, a collaboration with Swatch insulates AP from cries of commoditization and going downmarket, while simultaneously increasing the surface area of its desirability among a new generation of potential buyers (Note that nobody was rioting outside an AP boutique). The more people who wear a Royal Pop, the more desirable the exclusivity of the real-deal Royal Oak becomes, because suddenly an entire generation knows what a Royal Oak is. And getting that generation to notice is hard.
Meanwhile, In Crewe.
In striking contrast to AP, Bentley just announced a collaboration that almost nobody is talking about. It’s a fascinating strategic comparison.
The collaboration in question is Bentley’s unveiling of an Audi Q7 in drag bespoke Bentayga EWB Chalet Edition. Strictly limited edition. Hand-painted in Light Tudor Grey with alpine flower embroidery. Done in partnership with the Gstaad Guy, an insider social media satirist of the wealthy.
Here’s the problem. The Gstaad Guy’s entire satirical premise is that true luxury is quiet, understated, and needs no announcement. Bentley then announces a car embodying these values to millions of people on social media, with attendant press releases and marketing apparatus. But the medium isn’t just contradicting the message; it’s eroding the brand. It doesn’t matter who the influencer is; this is how DTC companies sell $50 frying pans.
It also reflects a deeper issue. Unlike AP, Bentley is under real pressure. In 2024, revenue fell 10% to pandemic-era levels, operating profit dropped 37%, and unit sales fell 21.5%. In 2025, deliveries fell another 5%. Meanwhile, Ferrari grew, Lamborghini hit a record, and Rolls-Royce held steady. Every major ultra-luxury automotive brand is chasing the same pool of rich buyers, and Bentley is the one losing ground. The brand has quietly stopped disclosing unit sales as its core markets contract and an expensive electric transition looms. This is not a marketing team making a bold move from a position of strength. It's a team that can't afford a mistake, reaching for the safe and defensible choice. The kind nobody gets fired for.
And that’s the real tragedy here. Bentley almost certainly knows the Gstaad Guy collaboration is an expensive gamble that’s unlikely to move the needle by much. It’s a boringly forgettable contradiction — luxury car brand loudly peddles discreet wealth to millions of people by partnering with luxury satirist to gently mock how luxury brands talk about themselves. Christ, only an advertising creative director could’ve come up with something so convoluted.
The contrast, then, is stark. AP, from a position of strength, is willing to look a bit nuts to get the result it wants. Bentley, from a position of weakness, isn’t willing to look nuts at all, just oh-so-clever. The painful irony is that Bentley probably needs a Royal Pop moment far more than AP does. It needs something to make people engage with a brand gone stale. But that move requires a confidence you don’t have when volume is falling, margins are compressing, and an electric transition needs funding.
Safe moves often feel responsible when the numbers are going south. What’s harder to see is that just as often, taking no risk is the biggest risk of all.