Should you buy a Swatch Royal Pop? The answer might not be that simple…
There is a great British truth, much loved by valuers – novelty is expensive, but utility keeps turning up for work.
The new AP x Swatch Royal Pop is a delightful novelty. It is a 40mm, 8.4mm-thick, hand-wound mechanical pocket watch in flashy plastic, with a sapphire crystal, calfskin lanyard and a retail price just shy of £350. A few weeks ago, you would have seen me writing about it, predicting riots, and generally the kind of scenes usually reserved for toilet roll during a pandemic. Whilst we are all aware that the current resale prices are ridiculous, we all know that in September, these will be available in the shops and will avoid meeting in a car park with someone in a hoody.
What I have been thinking about over the past couple of weeks, is what other options you could have for around that same price….and then I elaborated a little bit and thought about £500. It’s not Casio, but it’s not Rolex money – it’s a good amount to spend on a nice watch, and conveniently, I bought two watches in this price range last week.
Seiko are the best maker of watches in the world…I really do mean that, and I genuinely would advise everyone who wants to just tell the time with an instrument on their wrist to get one.
The Seiko 5 Sports, and other ranges incorporate lots of letters and numbers, none of which you will remember, so – the best of the bunch is nicknamed ‘The Blueberry’, 42.5mm steel case, 24 hour rotating bezel, and 10 bar resistance – none of these things will be particularly useful to 90% of the owners, however it’s good to know that you are covered in a really enthusiastic wet evening in Fulham.
Spinnaker, meanwhile, are doing something that I think deserves more credit than it gets. They make watches that understand the very simple pleasure of a bezel, a dial with a bit of theatre, and a case that looks as though it might have once been near a harbour. The range is all within my personally allocated budget, and for the money, exceptional value.
Then there is Tissot, who sit in that wonderfully useful part of the market where you can still say “Swiss Made” without having to sell all your Micron shares. The PRX quartz is £335, 40mm, steel, sapphire crystal and just about the most obvious answer to this question, and for the money it really is an astonishing watch. 99% of people will need nothing else. The automatic PRX is better for the movement snobs, but at £640 it has wandered out of this particular pub and into the wine bar next door.
And then, as it happens, we arrive at the two watches I bought last week, because I am not above using an article as a confession booth.
The first is the Dennison Natural Stone Tiger Eye, and I absolutely love it. It is not a watch you buy because you need a tool. Nobody needs a gold PVD cushion-cased watch with a natural tiger’s eye dial, in the same way that nobody needs a velvet smoking jacket, a tortoiseshell letter opener, or a special spoon for grapefruit, but life is better with a few unnecessary objects…
The Dennison is 37mm by 33.5mm, barely over 6mm thick, with a sapphire crystal, a Swiss Ronda quartz movement and a dial that looks as though someone trapped a Lincolnshire sunset under glass. It also won the GPHG 2025 Challenge Watch Prize, which sounds grand because it is grand, and because watch awards generally involve men in black tie giving prizes to things that cost more than a Range Rover. This one is not that, it is charming, thin, slightly dressy, and exactly the sort of object that makes you check the time twice because the first glance was for pleasure rather than information. Coming in at slightly over £460, I thought it was a lovely watch for the money, and just very unusual in the marketplace.
The second is the Martin Design (or MD Watches Studio) Supernatural Tonaros, and this is a completely different animal. The Tonaros is an automatic regulator with a 40mm steel case, 46mm lug-to-lug, 12mm thickness, double-curved sapphire crystal and a Miyota 82S7 movement with a 42-hour running time. This is not another tasteful homage and thank God for that. It has an asymmetrical regulator layout, a frosted multi-layered dial and is the sort of watch that will annoy the right people. It makes telling the time a tiny process rather than a glance. Last week whilst enjoying a post work drink I genuinely lost track of time because of the slight effort involved in working out the dial…honestly.
This, really, is the problem with the AP x Swatch Royal Pop. It is not that it is bad. It is almost certainly very good fun. Swatch themselves describe the Royal Pop as a collection of eight pocket watches mixing Royal Oak design cues with the modular Swatch POP line, powered by a hand-wound version of SISTEM51, and that is precisely the sort of lunacy Swatch should be allowed to attempt. I am delighted it exists. I am delighted people are cross about it. I am delighted that somewhere, right now, a man who owns a lot of books is arguing why it is not a “proper” Audemars Piguet, as if Swatch had accidentally put £80,000 worth of finishing in a plastic case and nobody noticed.
But for my own money, I think I would rather have a regular Swatch.
That is not an insult – quite the opposite. Swatch are one of the great watch brands because they understand something that many watch companies forgot as soon as they discovered waiting lists – watches are allowed to be fun.
A Swatch does not need to pretend to be an heirloom. It does not need to come with a photograph of a mountaineer, a naval officer or a racing driver, it can simply be colourful, light, Swiss, cheerful and useful. I have about 20 Swatch watches, they all get wrist time, and they all are great fun. Strangely, the most useful watch I own happened to be an oversized Neon model which incorporated ‘Swatchpay’ which basically turns your watch in to your debit card – and for a rather ill-informed midlife crisis visit to the Glastonbury festival last year, became the most amazing invention ever.
So yes, the Royal Pop is bonkers. I hope it sells. I hope it irritates exactly the right people. I hope Swatch keep doing this sort of thing because the industry needs mischief almost as much as it needs movements.
But £350 to £500 is real watch money, and will buy you so many amazing things, and if what you really want is a Swatch, then buy a Swatch, not the headline. Buy the plastic, colourful, brilliantly democratic thing they have been making better than almost anyone for decades.
Novelty is expensive. Utility keeps turning up for work. But fun, if you shop carefully, is still kind of affordable.
Alastair has been involved in the antiques industry for over 20 years as an auctioneer and valuer. Alastair has a particularly broad knowledge with interests and passions to include the following specialities; militaria, watches, automobilia, rock and pop, posters, comics books, and musical instruments.