The pocket watch, as a commercial proposition, has been dead since roughly the Battle of the Somme. Leave it to the Swiss to revive it.

On Friday morning, lines formed outside Swatch boutiques from Sydney to Manhattan to the Ginza district of Tokyo, where 300 people had assembled before sunrise. In India, shoppers pushed past barriers. Outside Philadelphia, at the King of Prussia mall, someone was arrested after a door-breaking incident. By Saturday, Swatch was issuing statements begging customers to stay home.

The object of all this enthusiasm was a $400 pocket watch — the Royal Pop, a collaboration between Swatch, which has been selling plastic fashion watches since 1983, and Audemars Piguet, the independent Swiss manufacturer whose entry-level Royal Oak wristwatch starts somewhere north of $25,000 and whose waiting lists are measured in years rather than days.

Within hours, the watches were trading on secondary markets for $6,000. (Swatch has confirmed the Royal Pop is not a limited edition, but none of that mattered on launch day.)

The partnership is notable for what it is not. When Swatch introduced its MoonSwatch in 2022, borrowing the design language of the Omega Speedmaster, it was essentially moving assets between divisions of the same corporate family — Swatch Group owns both brands. Audemars Piguet, by contrast, is famously independent and has been since 1875. This represents the first time Swatch has persuaded an outside rival of that stature to lend its most distinctive asset to a $400 object.

The choice of format was equally deliberate. A budget version of the Royal Oak worn on the wrist would have invited the one comparison that destroys value: this looks like that, but cheaper. A pocket watch on a lanyard makes that comparison structurally impossible.

Audemars Piguet, a manufacturer that most consumers under 30 could not identify in a police lineup, spent the weekend as the most discussed watch brand on the planet. Swatch, which has spent four decades fighting the perception that its products are toys, borrowed horological credibility at minimal cost. Both brands, one suspects, left the weekend with their filing cabinets slightly fuller than they entered it.

Original story published in The Drum: "Mark Ritson: Swatch shows that co-branding is marketing’s most underrated growth lever | The Drum"