If you have any interest in watches, unless you have been on Mars or buried under a rock then you would have heard of the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collaboration. Unveiled on 16 May 2026, it consists of eight bioceramic pocket watches priced between £335 and £350, retailing the Royal Oak’s iconic design through Swatch boutiques worldwide. The watch world descended into chaos.
Overnight, queues of hundreds formed outside stores from Tokyo’s Ginza to London’s Covent Garden. In Pennsylvania, New York, Milan and several other cities, dozens of police officers were dispatched as crowds turned defiant, keeping some boutiques closed. Swatch was forced to post a public appeal for calm, warning that queues exceeding 50 people “cannot be accepted.” The resale market echoed the hype. On StockX, the full set of eight watches retailing at $3,240 combined sold for an average of $9,476. Individual pieces settled around $905, with eBay listings reaching as high as $15,000.
The queues outside a Swatch store in London waiting to buy a Royal Pop before the brand announced the store would not open that day.
But behind the frenzy lies a story that seems as much about intellectual property (IP) law as hype culture. It is a strange thing, but if Audemars Piguet (AP) had trademarked the Royal Oak design from the start (in 1972), this mess would have probably never occurred. In the last couple of years, AP has suffered two significant trademark defeats in two of its most important watch markets.
In Japan, AP had applied to the Japan Patent Office (JPO) to register the design of the Royal Oak. The JPO refused, its Appeals Board affirmed the refusal in June 2023 and in March 2024, Japan’s IP High Court dismissed AP’s further appeal. The court found that the design “remains within the scope of expected selection of the shape for functional reasons of a wristwatch” and lacks inherent distinctiveness.
The pocket watch design where the octagonal element can be switch as it “pops” out of the bracket.
In the United States, AP had filed to register two substantially identical 3D configurations of the Royal Oak in July 2020. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) refused in January 2024, calling the features “nondistinctive” and “highly common in the watch industry.” AP appealed to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), but on 4 January 2025, the TTAB affirmed the refusal. A ruling so significant it was later incorporated into the USPTO’s own Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure. Importantly, the TTAB found that even AP’s voluminous advertising could not establish acquired distinctiveness, because those materials invariably displayed the word marks “AP” or “Audemars Piguet” alongside the design.
Across both matters AP failed to present any consumer evidence in the form of a survey to either the JPO or the USPTO. There was nothing on the record showing that consumers view the shape mark as an indicator of source of the AP brand and held that this similarly weighed against a finding of acquired distinctiveness.
The elements cited to and then denied by the JPO as a trademark are incorporated into the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collaboration: “dial with tapisserie pattern and hour markers, a date window, an octagonal bezel with eight hexagonal screws, case, crown and lug.”
The timeline surrounding the Royal Pop launch is striking. Swatch filed to trademark “Royal Pop” in Switzerland in January 2024, just before the Japan IP High Court ruling. It registered the mark in the US in December 2024, weeks before the TTAB decision landed. Whether this was legal strategy or coincidence, the effect is the same. By attaching the Audemars Piguet name directly to the octagonal bezel across 200 Swatch stores, millions of social media posts, and a global resale frenzy, the Royal Pop builds the very consumer association between design and brand that the TTAB said was absent from AP’s trademark evidence. It is, in essence, the “look for” advertising campaign that AP never ran.
There are also financial concerns to be considered. Although the premium for the secondary market Royal Oaks remains significant, since the 50th anniversary in 2022 – when prices on the secondary market peaked – there has been a consistent decline of around 25 percent. Equally, MoonSwatch secondary market prices dropped nearly 18 percent year-on-year in Q1 2024, and another 5.5 percent in the following three months, with some references trading under £200 on eBay. “MoonSwatch fatigue” had set in by mid-2023, driven by a flood of near-identical Moonshine Gold variants.
Complete set of eight Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collaboration retailing at $3,240 and being sold on StockX for an average of $9,476.
By creating the Royal Pop with Swatch, both brands are looking to gain from the hype. Swatch once again has the headlines and consumers looking at their watches. AP now has heightened market awareness and controls the lower price segment of the market concerned with their own design. The ubiquitous copies of Royal Oaks that exist in various countries are now obviously producing unlicensed and unrecognised fakes. AP has achieved separability in markets where the same consumer product design or formula can be sold for different prices, maximising producer surplus and diminishing consumer surplus. This is pure profit maximisation.
All of this makes the Royal Pop collaboration even more strategically interesting: the launch has now generated exactly the kind of spontaneous – mass consumer association between the octagonal bezel and the AP name, – that a well-designed survey could now, for the first time, credibly capture. Although both companies have declined to confirm the IP or market angles, few who watched the queues snake around the block in various cities will doubt that something more calculated than nostalgia is at work.
Author: Dr Andrew Hildreth
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