Three times the retail price in less than a week. Lines stretching for several nights in Paris, London, Milan, and New York. And a pocket watch—a format abandoned a century ago—that has suddenly become the most sought-after item of May. The Royal Pop collection by Audemars Piguet and Swatch is hard to explain if you look at the object itself. It makes perfect sense, however, when you consider the mechanics behind it.
On May 16, 2026, the very day of the in-store release, searches for the term “Swatch” on the Catawiki platform surged by 400% compared to the same week the previous year. Some models, priced at €385 in stores, were already fetching €1,300 on the secondary market—a 3.4-fold increase in less than ten days. The figures do not reflect commercial success; they describe a pattern.
The third installment in a series
The Royal Pop is not a collaboration. It is the third installment in a series developed with the consistency of a publishing house. In 2022, the MoonSwatch—already made of bioceramic, priced at €250 in stores and reaching a high of €1,600 on Catawiki—made Swatch the platform’s fastest-growing brand that year, with sales volumes increasing twelvefold. In 2023, Blancpain added a dimension of historical depth—the Fifty Fathoms as the reference model, the ocean as the thematic focus. In 2026, it’s the 1972 Royal Oak, designed by Gérald Genta, that enters the rotation.
Time and again, the pattern repeats itself with an engineer’s precision: a luxury watchmaker whose iconic model remains out of reach for most people, a colorful bioceramic variation available in stores, exclusive distribution through physical retail locations, and a single global launch date. The format changes—a wristwatch for the MoonSwatch, a pocket watch for the Royal Pop—but the overall logic remains the same.
Mark Zalewski, a watch expert at Catawiki, observes : “By giving each launch a distinct, carefully considered, and hard-to-obtain character, the brand has made limited availability an integral part of the item’s appeal.”
Format as a Signal
The choice of a pocket watch deserves a separate discussion. In 2026, offering a pocket watch—an item that has been absent from the wrist for at least fifty years—is not a nostalgic throwback. It is a deliberate break from the norm in a market saturated with wristwatches featuring octagonal dials. The original Royal Oak is instantly recognizable by its case with eight visible screws, its beveled bezel, and its shape—which has defined sporty luxury for half a century. Transforming it into a pocket watch—wearable as a fashion accessory, strappable like a piece of streetwear—rewrites the rules of interpretation without betraying its formal language.
The eight models launched simultaneously—including “OTG ROZ,” “Green Eight,” and “Orenji hachi”—reinforce this message: the collection does not offer a single object of desire but rather a system of distinct desires, with each colorway appealing to a different community. It’s not a watch. It’s a collection platform.
What Bioceramics Enable
Bioceramics are not a matter of style. They are the material that makes cost-effective translation possible. Lighter and more scratch-resistant than steel, it can be produced in vibrant colors that are impossible to achieve using traditional metalworking processes and, above all, it lowers manufacturing costs without visually betraying this cost savings. To the wearer, it conveys “contemporary” and “technical.” To the brand, it conveys “scalable.” It is the very foundation of the entire model.
Audemars Piguet knows what it’s doing. The brand, which previously collaborated on the Royal Oak with Cactus Jack—Travis Scott’s label—has long understood that the appeal of an iconic model isn’t measured by the stylistic consistency of its partners. It is measured by the ability to reach communities that don’t normally intersect—and to turn an all-night line into a ritual shared by a fan of manufacture chronographs and a collector of vintage sneakers.
On Catawiki, the watches category was already the top category in terms of volume and revenue by 2025. Royal Pop didn’t create this demand; it simply identified it more accurately than its predecessors.
Royal Pop: Market Data
Retail price: 385€. Distribution: exclusive in-store release, May 16, 2026. Announced material: bioceramic. Format: pocket watch. Number of models at launch: eight. Prices observed on Catawiki (first week): up to 1,300€. MoonSwatch 2022 comparison: 250€ retail, 1,600€ secondary market, ×12 Swatch volumes on Catawiki. Cities with documented lines: Paris, London, Milan, New York.
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