Royal Popped
What the AP x Swatch launch looked like at a suburban Chicago mall.
I got to the Oakbrook mall, 20 miles west of Chicago, about 90 minutes before the Swatch Store was set to open at 10 a.m.
As I pulled up, a police officer was already on a megaphone, announcing that the store wouldn’t be opening today. A few hundred people were standing around anyway. You can’t camp overnight at the suburban outdoor mall, but they started showing up as early as 4 a.m. to wait in line.
Are you the store manager? I asked the guy I’d seen talking to the group of 6-8 police officers gathered.
He said no, avoiding eye contact and shuffling away as fast as he could.
I called after him, explaining that I wasn’t trying to buy a Royal Pop (I wasn’t mad), I just cover watches. That softened him, if only a bit, and he confided that he is the manager. He was visibly frustrated; he talked about how the launch could’ve been handled better—a pre-sale lottery, online sales, or communication about allocation at each store. They should’ve done it differently, he said, perhaps not clear who “they” is, though there’s plenty of blame to go around.
As we talked, the police taped a few signs to the door:
SWATCH WILL BE CLOSED TODAY, 5/16/2026
There were some groans, some boos. People started to disperse, but not really. Some of them didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that it was over before it’d even begun.
At least while I was there, the scene at the Swatch Store in suburban Chicago was tame compared to the clips we’ve all seen as the time zones ticked around the world and the Royal Pop went on sale in Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, New York. Closing the store for the day was the only reasonable decision.
I stuck around for 30 minutes before deciding I’d seen everything I needed to. I talked to onlookers, a mix of high schoolers and adults in hoodies, sweatpants, and lots of logos. One guy showed me his iced-out “Santos” and told me he was getting into making “custom jewelry for rappers,” showing me photos of a few chains he’d made for local talent.
At some point, Swatch posted on Instagram, asking people to “kindly not rush to our stores.” I don’t think anyone in Oakbrook got the message.
‘Resale’s only gonna go up now’—guy in the grey hoodie (you can hear it if you play the video).
I posted a quick video, and my DMs started overflowing with messages and videos from people who’d been there at 4, 5, 6 a.m. Videos of people rushing and banging on the store’s doors, lots of yelling, shouting AP, AP, AP, and tussles between police and onlookers.
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C.D. Peacock is in the same mall. It’s one of the best watch retail experiences I’ve seen.
Since I was in the neighborhood, I walked the 600 steps from Swatch to C.D. Peacock. Almost as soon as I walked in, I started overhearing conversations about the Royal Pop. It’s all anyone wanted to talk about as I took another look at the new Tudor Monarch. In the pre-owned selection, I noticed one pre-owned Royal Oak for sale (price: $260,000).
Up on the second floor, I saw a group of three teenagers sitting at the bar. C.D. Peacock has a nice bar, and they do a pretty good flat white. More importantly for a group of 16-year-olds, it’s free.
The trio of high schoolers all had the same haircut—if you’ve been around teenage boys recently, you know the broccoli cut. They all had the same Essentials hoodie and Yeezy slides.
I finished my flat white and went over to ask them if they were at the Swatch Store. Of course they were. They showed me some videos on their phones.
There was a Snapchat of them rolling up at 6 a.m. Hundreds of people sprinting to the Swatch Store, hopping the ropes and fence barricades the Swatch Store had set up the night before, as if those would’ve been enough.
The high schoolers told me they were caught in the middle of the mob when people started rushing the door. They showed me the scuffs on their slides. One of the kids told me he was punched in the stomach by a police officer.
If you got a Royal Pop, were you going to keep it or resell it? I asked them. Two of them immediately said they’d resell. “It’s all about the market,” one of them said. The third was convinced Swatch was selling an accessory that would let you convert it into a wristwatch (they’re not).
We talked for a few more minutes. It’s their last week of sophomore year. I asked if they were going to try again on Sunday. One of them said yes.
“The price is gonna go up on the market now,” he said, listing off the Swatch stores that were closed for the day.
He might be right, for now at least. eBay shows dozens of completed sales for over $2,000.
Swatch completely bungled the release, just as it did in 2022 with the MoonSwatch. 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.
At Oakbrook, it sounds like the extent of the preparation was putting up a few ropes that merely suggest people queue up in an orderly fashion like a TSA line at the airport. AP may be less culpable (and it’s donating its share of profits to a watchmaking initiative), but its name is still on the dial.
Driving home, I thought about what I, or anyone covering watches, could’ve done differently. Here’s what I came up with.
We let Swatch and Audemars Piguet cloak the Royal Pop in the language of democratization and accessibility. Opening up watches to a new generation of enthusiasts. Opening up watches to women.1
We nodded along and amplified these ideas. We chose to forget or ignore that these are companies. Not brands or maisons or manufacturers, but companies. In the case of Swatch, a publicly traded company, and not one without issues. AP is privately held, but there are still reports of tension among its minority shareholders.
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. MoonSwatch showed that the line between hype and a teenager getting punched is, sadly, thinner than we’d like to admit.
They had every reason to be ready this time. The only explanation for why they weren’t is that they wanted this, or at least some version of it.
It’s easy to say that Swatch and AP got what they deserved. But a lot of us in watches played along. For views, clicks, followers, subscribers.
And we got what we deserved, too.
It Wasn’t a Legal Strategy
I’ve seen this totally ridiculous idea that Audemars Piguet collaborated with Swatch because they lost some trademark battles in the U.S. and Japan. AP lost protection for its iconic Royal Oak design, and the market was about to be flooded with cheap knock-offs, so AP had to create a cheap version itself—or so the thinking goes.
The lawyer in me can’t take it, so I’d like to briefly debunk it:
AP already won a lawsuit in 2014 against a cheap Royal Oak knock-off, with a U.S. federal court awarding it $10m in damages. That decision focused on the similarities between the knock-off’s bezel and screws to the Royal Oak’s design. In other words, AP won because the court said its bezel design was distinctive and worthy of protection. With that decision, AP was confident it could walk into any courtroom and use the exact blueprint against any copycat to protect its octagonal bezel.
In 2020, AP filed two new trademark applications, seeking to protect detailed 3D drawings of the Royal Oak on bracelet or on strap:
These trademarks sought broader protection for the Royal Oak. Not just the bezel design, but the case, dial, everything else that makes the Royal Oak the Royal Oak.
The U.S. trademark office ruled against AP, saying (in part) that trademark law doesn’t protect functional elements of a design. For example, a round dial (as seen on the Royal Oak) is well-established as an efficient way of timekeeping and thus not protectable.
The final nail in the coffin for this little theory is the design of the Royal Pop itself. If this were a legal gambit, the collab would have been entirely different. In those 2020 filings, AP was trying to protect elements of the Royal Oak that made it a wristwatch, e.g., the way the case and bracelet are integrated. Those drawings are wristwatches.
But the Royal Pop completely abandons the wrist. It practically distills the design down to just the octagonal bezel and screws, which AP already has strong protection of, thanks to its 2014 victory.
Finally, anyone who’s ever worked in a company knows that no company would let the guidance of lawyers drive a massive campaign like this. In my experience, lawyers are mostly ignored, or at best, treated as a sporadically helpful nuisance.
Postscript. I was asked by just about everyone this week about Royal Pop. My mom texted me after seeing it on the Sunday evening news:
The Wall Street Journal reached out to me earlier in the week. Here’s what Sam Schube had to say about the Royal Pop (before said chaos ensued).
Finally, I recently published the latest YouTube video about my “Holy Trinity” of 90s dress watches:
A few relevant links:
Looking back at my videos from Saturday morning, there is not a single woman in frame. This is not surprising.
Tony dodging mobs and sipping flat whites together with teenagers who rock iced out Rolexes; this is why I subscribe ;)
of course they knew what would happen, it’s precisely what they wanted to happen.
let’s take a moment to consider their mindset, they carefully orchestrated the whole thing (from the early teasers to release day) to get to this exact outcome. they’re sociopaths.