Royal Pop: A 24 Hour Retrospective
Hindsight is 20/20 or maybe not.
The Royal Pop has dropped, or at least, the planned drop date has come and gone and it was marked by widely varying experiences from would-be first day buyers depending on where you were. In some locations the launch was fairly straightforward and in some, very much the opposite, although the one common element was that lots of people left disappointed, which at least puts the collaboration – the presentation of a democratically priced, intentionally unserious take on an exclusively priced, generally very serious watch – on common ground with so many other experiences in the luxury watch world and with the luxury world in general.
The question of exclusivity and demand exceeding supply is an interesting one in this case because of course, there are actually relatively few luxury watches for which demand far exceeds availability. Most enthusiasts can list the most prominent examples with no effort at all: steel Daytonas; steel Royal Oaks; steel Pateks, and of course a whole slew of high end hand finished watches from revered independents. (Then there are things like early brass movement Journes, but of course there is no waiting list per se for such things, unless it’s waiting for a rich uncle to die so you have a shot at one if it comes up at auction). The Royal Pop at launch was so unavailable for most people who wanted one – whether flippers, the merely curious, or bona fide collectors – that almost certainly, you couldn’t have one, and this means that at least one significant aspect of the high end watch collector experience, which is frustration, was available to all and sundry, which is I guess a kind of democratization. For one magic moment, you didn’t have to be a millionaire to experience frustration at not being able to get a high demand watch – anybody with a few hundred bucks and a desire to feel part of the larger pop culture x luxury zeitgeist could play.
The Royal Pop thanks to its relationship with the Royal Oak, was the subject of intense analysis before the launch, and painstaking forensics post-launch. The purpose the collaboration was meant to serve seems fairly clear. The value proposition for Swatch was to take advantage of the recognizability of the Royal Oak as a status symbol, to leverage fresh visibility for Swatch itself; the value proposition for Audemars Piguet as much as I can mind-read, seems to be for the brand to position itself as au courant and willing to experiment, as well as to produce an object which will act as a visible seed for growing interest in the Royal Oak in particular, and Audemars Piguet in general, outside of the group of already committed collectors.
Viewed purely as a marketing strategy it’s hard to fault the (speculated) value proposition for either brand, although for Audemars Piguet, the question of what to do with what marketers call a wider funnel – the point at which people become aware of the brand and become potential clients – is an open one given the fact that the demand for the Royal Oak models is already far in excess of what AP can meet and it seems unlikely that the Royal Pop was the first step in increasing awareness pursuant to increasing production numbers. It seems to me that the problem is one of exclusivity versus revenue – certainly, it would be possible over the short term for AP to make more money through the simple expedient of making more watches (the logistics involved in significantly increasing production are another question) but naturally, the desirability of the watches is inversely proportional to their availability and it protects the aura of the Royal Oak for it to not be too widely available. On this view, the Royal Pop is a success in that it’s designed to be constantly visible (if the reasonable speculation that it’s meant to be worn as a bag charm is correct) and its unavailability at launch is just part of the larger strategy of exclusivity for the Royal Oak itself writ large. An individual consumer who waited for hours or days to get one and then couldn’t, understandably feels slighted and there are plenty of complaints online that Swatch ought to have made sure that enough watches were available to meet launch day demand, but naturally, that would have defeated the whole purpose of the exercise.
Possible drawbacks to the collaboration which could be seen ahead of time include, for AP, the low but non-zero possibility that nobody would be interested or that interest would be tepid at best, but it was fairly clear the moment the teaser material went out, that this was not going to be an issue. I wouldn’t put it so simplistically as to say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity – these days, especially, there certainly is and it can spread with almost instantaneous rapidity – but in terms of reach, the Royal Pop did for AP exactly what it was intended to do. The collaboration both before and after launch was on the radar(s) of millions of people and I struggle to think of any actual marketing campaign AP could have run, which would have had the same effect purely in terms of scope. For all that dignified pictures of Le Brassus or of the Museum, or of someone painstakingly assembling a Grand Complication, might seem more on brand to enthusiasts (especially those, like myself, with an historical or technical bent) the Royal Pop as an exercise in raw exposure was probably at least several orders of magnitude more effective. AP put a tremendous amount of care, money, and effort into AP Chronicles, for instance, which today remains one of the single best examples of self-curated brand content I can think of; a resource for serious enthusiasts which in detail and accuracy has few rivals in the luxury watch world (I say “few” but I actually can’t think of any) but Royal Pop is after different goals and playing a different game.
The Royal Oak is one of the greatest success stories in modern watchmaking on a number of levels but one of them, of course, is the degree to which the design has crossed over from the enthusiast world to the larger world of pop and celebrity culture. For the Royal Oak family to maintain that success and that visibility, it has to periodically refresh its public image. AP has done crossovers with popular culture before, under the previous CEO, but those were high x low crossovers symbolically, not economically, which makes a world of difference in terms of broader impact, widening the funnel, and attracting a new and younger (and more diverse) audience. The problem for AP comes when folks are at the top of the funnel, and the gap that has to be bridged involves entry price points in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of dollars, years-long waiting lists, and the probability that to get allocation, any aspiring Royal Oak owner will be asked to qualify through non-Royal Oak purchases. I feel pretty sure, however, that this question has already occurred to AP as it is an obvious one; whether it is a question that even needs a solution depends on whether or not the gulf between the top of the funnel and ownership of a Royal Oak is problematic for Audemars Piguet. It looks like it might be, at first glance, or even that it should be; but depending on who eventually gets through the filter, it may not be a problem at all. Audemars Piguet doesn’t need to appeal to millions of potentially qualified aspirational future Royal Oak clients; that’s never going to be a large cohort. All it needs to do is keep the aura of exclusivity, desirability, and relevance fresh.
The real problem, it occurs to me, is a larger one for the luxury watch industry, and the hard luxury world in general: “allocation” is not a sexy word. Disruptive high x low collaborations will do little to devalue any luxury product; such strategies seem to succeed quite often and when they fail, they produce indifference, not outrage. Transactionalism, though, can really kill the vibe. I’m a former Royal Oak owner and I don’t really miss mine (although I’d be lying if I didn’t say I sometimes wish I still had it, but my kids’ tuition wasn’t going to pay itself) but I do think the most interesting watch AP has right now (to me) is not a Royal Oak; it’s the Neo Frame.
I think this is a fascinating watch (that would perhaps be better put, “I’m fascinated by this watch” as I don’t think it’s fascinating to everyone). It’s not a vintage refresh or a vintage adjacent refresh à la the Cartier Privé watches; it’s not a Royal Oak or a Code 11.59, and it’s not a reboot of the discontinued Jules Audemars or Edward Piguet collections (albeit I would welcome the JA Jump Hour Repeater and JA Equation of Time back to current production with the greatest enthusiasm). It’s a net new design, and I think it has the potential to be a real counterweight, at least design-wise, to the Royal Oak, and it’s original enough that it doesn’t feel like an also-ran. Honestly, with that sapphire front cover, it would make one hell of a repeater.
Finally, while it is natural to assume some causal relationship between the physical specifics of the Royal Pop, and the violence that erupted in some locations, I think the mob behavior ultimately had much more to do with the universals of crowd psychology – de-individuation and loss of personal responsibility, social contagion, anonymity – than it did with the fact that there is a bio-ceramic bag-tag version of a popular wristwatch design. It would be nice if mob violence really were limited to limited editions, but alas, that’s not how we’re wired.
Although if you really wanted a Royal Pop and couldn’t get one on launch day there’s always this consolation prize:
Before the break, a few things I’m reading this week that you might enjoy getting your teeth into:
Performance Watch Review: Eternal Chronographs. This is a look at natural processes that can be used as elapsed timers for long periods of time. I mean really long periods of time – thousands to many millions of years. A chronograph with a complication based on the half life of plutonium, for the discerning gentleman or lady?
Screw Down Crown: Royal Pop – Two Possibilities. This is a look at two possible outcomes over the medium term, of the Royal Pop collab. Very detailed and makes compelling reading for those of you who are into this level of analysis. I feel like anyone who subscribes to Split Seconds already subscribes to SDC but you know what, content is content.
The 1916 Company: Ceramics in Watchmaking – What They Are, Why They’re Used, And Why They’re Tougher Than You Think. This is sort of Revenge Of The Enamel Dial Daytona, or at least it was motivated by the discussion. I realized that I wanted to understand – really understand – what makes a ceramic a ceramic and not a glass or metal, and really understand why modern engineering ceramics are so much tougher than clay-based ceramics. This is the result. Bonus at the end on IWC’s Ceratanium and how exactly the alloy becomes surface-hardened, or “ceramized” as IWC puts it.
And, speaking of ceramics, here’s a look at everyone’s favorite ceramic you didn’t know was a ceramic: Super-LumiNova, or strontium aluminate. For this section, I’m indebted to Ming Thein, who pointed out to me after the publication of the 1916 Co. article that Super-LumiNova is a ceramic (and who mentioned its use in the luminous material HyCeram; there is an excellent story on luminous materials on MING.com). Also after the jump, thoughts on going to Mars (not with chemical rockets, you’re not) and an argument for mechanical watches for crewed interplanetary spaceflight.
My Favorite Ceramic Glows In The Dark
It might have occurred to me eventually that Super-LumiNova is a ceramic, but it might not have, and I have Ming Thein to thank for pointing that out. Strontium aluminate fits the definition of a ceramic exactly; its chemical formula is SrAl2O4 (there are slightly different chemical formulations depending on details of a particular compound, but that’s the basic one) and so, it’s a combination of oxides of strontium (a metal) and aluminum (another metal), and if you read the 1916 Co. story you’ll note that in general modern engineering ceramics are a combination of a metal or metals, with oxygen, nitrogen, or carbon, to form oxides, nitrides, and carbides.