For a week Today, watch fans on Instagram are losing their minds over what looks like leaked product images. Lively Audemars Piguet Royal Oak plastic wristwatches in bright colors: navy blue and orange, pink, yellow and green. Legends guessed prices and launch lineups. Comment sections were arguing about colors. None of it was real. Each image was AI-powered.
When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirm their Royal Pop Collaboration on May 8, the teaser campaign left just enough ambiguity to allow the watch web to fill the void with its own vision. The result was a week-long hype cycle built not around the product itself, but around an AI-generated simulacrum.
So when the real Royal Pop collection dropped on Tuesday, earlier than expected (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), yes, it turned out really different and interesting. But for a significant portion of the public who had already fallen into the trap of counterfeits, it was truly disappointing.
Courtesy of Prompthaus
This is a new problem. When Swatch launched the MoonSwatch with Omega in 2022, there were no publicly available AI image generators capable of flooding the area with photorealistic versions of the watch from single-line prompts. Even later editions as recent as Snoopy “Cold Moon” did not spark the social unrest that Royal Pop has endured over the past seven days.
“Pre-launch hype has become a key part of all of this, a hugely valuable part,” says Chris Hall, founder of the popular The fourth wheel Substack (and a WIRED Contributor). “Today’s audiences are even more informed than they were four years ago, so it’s very difficult for the real watch to exceed expectations or produce a real shock of the new, especially when the whole world has generated its own images of what it might look like.”
Never mind that Swatch carefully tried to manage expectations by first teasing the lanyards, clearly signaling that this was a pocket watch and not worn on the wrist. Once the first brightly colored plastic Royal Oak AI images were posted on Instagram, with plastic straps reflecting the AP’s iconic design, the algorithm sprang into action. Soon thousands of people were reposting the Royal Pops wristwatch, while others began designing their own takes, all as convincing as the last entirely unreal watch, deliberately ignoring the obvious cord clue.
The dream was clear: Watch fans wanted the moon on a stick, fantasizing about owning a hyper-precise, low-budget version of an iconic high-end wristwatch selling for $20,000, and no official teases from Swatch leading to alternative outcomes were welcome.
The real deal
Disappointment aside, the Royal Pop Collection is a legitimately interesting proposition. A set of eight pocket watches made from Swatch bioceramic composite in two styles, Lépine (crown at 12 o’clock) and Savonnette (crown at 3 o’clock, with a small seconds at 6 o’clock), priced at $400 and $420 respectively.
Courtesy of Swatch
Loaded with iconic Royal Oak design elements, including the octagonal case, eight-screw bezel and Petite Tapisserie motif dial, the strapless design strongly references the 1979s. Royal Oak pocket watch reference 5691. Inside is a brand new hand-wound version of Swatch’s Sistem51 caliber, a completely machine-assembled movement. Swatch has 15 active patents on this new iteration and also boasts an impressive 90-hour power reserve. There is even an antimagnetic Nivachron hairspring which was also co-developed with Audemars Piguet.
Swatch POP line 1986whose watch heads could be physically ejected from their frames and clipped elsewhere, have been plundered here to create a design that allows the Royal Pops to also pop out of their bioceramic support clips.
Why there is no wrist watch
The simple logic of the pocket watch design authorized by Audemars Piguet, which, unlike Omegais not part of the Swatch Group, is that it does not disrupt its existing wealthy clientele. Royal Oak owners will no doubt breathe sighs of relief now that it’s confirmed that a version of their coveted pieces won’t be released for just a few hundred dollars.
However, that doesn’t mean AP would have been hurt financially if it had delivered what the public so clearly wanted. Omega, which was also worried about its sales when it presented the original internal MoonSwatch prototypes, enjoyed a considerable gain 50 percent increase in sales following the release of its budgetary cousin.
The Royal Pop pocket watch, cleverly, is a step designed to generate as much hype as possible while being as safe as possible for the AP brand. The Royal Oak design language is unmistakable, but the wrist is off-limits. With Swatch, Audemars has built something real for its ambitious fans; it just didn’t allow them to build what they wanted.
What does Swatch get out of it? Valuable PR too, but much more importantly, the potential for much-needed sales. In 2025, the group recorded a drop in sales of 6.75 percent and a a staggering drop of 55.6 percent in operating profit, mainly due to a sharp drop in demand for its watches in China, Hong Kong and Macau. Swatch Group shareholders are not happy.
How China will come to the rescue
This is where the story gets interesting for reasons neither Swatch nor AP anticipated. As Swatch resurrected its POP design, allowing the Royal Pop to be removed from its case, within hours of the Royal Pop’s announcement, third-party strap brands seized on the prospect, seeking to quickly create adaptations that transformed the pocket watch into a wristwatch. Since Royal Pops were designed to slide in and out of cords and desk stands, they should just as easily clip onto wristbands and straps specifically designed to accommodate them.
The market recognized in real time that Swatch and AP’s pocket watch tantalizingly contained everything structurally necessary to produce the wristwatch that the AI concepts had promised. All that remained was to connect the case to a wrist.
Brands are already announcing their concepts to fill this wristwatch-shaped void. Delugs, based in Singapore, was one of the first to do so by publishing its concept. design ideas on Instagram and set up a waiting list on its site for what he calls the WristPop project. Founder and CEO Kenneth Kuan confirmed that he had “asked the production team to give it top priority.”
“We are aiming for a release before the end of 2026,” Kuan told WIRED. “The ambition is to be the first to market with something credible and well-made. There will be – and already are – others who will rush to get something given the market opportunities here, but we want to be the ones who offer the product that is actually worth your money. Delugs has a shape here. He was the first to market rubber bracelets for Tissot PRX at its launch.
Kuan says Delugs makes a case strap system, not a single strap, because the Royal Pop’s case is not designed to accommodate one. “So we design both the case interface And the strap that attaches to it. The two parts will likely be made of different materials, but the strap itself will be made of rubber. The design language will be consistent with that of the Royal Oak,” says Kuan. “We want it to feel like a natural extension of the watch, not a workaround.”
It was only 24 hours since the revelation that I contacted Kuan, but the watch market has already responded to Delugs. Kuan says distributors are already asking to carry the Delugs straps and customers are keen to put down deposits now on something that is still just a concept.
Others appear to be considering ways to attach third-party bracelets they already produce, or are considering making integrated bracelets that could mirror the complicated AP version of the Royal Oak. But it is probably China that will progress the fastest. Alibaba and Temu sellers can realistically produce injection-molded or machined adapters and matching straps within weeks of the May 16 launch, perhaps sooner. Quality may not be assured, but speed will be.
Paul Midler, author of Badly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind the Chinese Production Game and consultant to companies with business interests in the region, is sure we will see Chinese mods for the Royal Pop soon.
“The manufacturing processes involve injection molding for the plastic and silicone, and perhaps some CNC machining for the metal parts,” he explains. “All are well within the wheelhouse of Chinese producers, and they are moving quickly. Given the buzz around this topic, Chinese manufacturers could have working prototypes available within weeks of getting specs. From there, we could realistically see listings online in less than a month.”
Aaron Alperfounder and CEO of supply chain specialist Izba Group, says he would be surprised if a strapping system wasn’t already under development in China. All we really need are these dimensional specifications. Alpeter recounts a meeting with a Taiwanese exporter 10 years ago who already had specifications for the brand new iPhone from a contact in a Chinese factory.
“They were already designing and building up inventory for a case and screen protector that was going to launch the same day Apple announced its iPhone,” he says.
Will Swatch step up its efforts?
“The best thing Swatch can do is give people what they want and make that design their own,” says Alpeter. “There will be a large ecosystem of knockoffs for people who want something that looks just as good but doesn’t have that value.”
The MoonSwatch had the chance to be evaluated on its own terms in 2022. Not only was it a real surprise, but Swatch also had complete control over the images in circulation. Royal Pop landed in a world that had already decided what it was. The product itself must now fight for attention against a phantom that will very soon be brought to fruition by taken outside the influence of Swatch and Audemars Piguet.
The AI generated the expectation. Chinese manufacturing will achieve this. And the pocket watch that Swatch and Audemars Piguet spent years secretly developing might, ultimately, be remembered as the chassis of a $15 wrist adapter from Shenzhen that finally delivered on the promise of the colorful plastic Royal Oaks everyone wanted.
Queues are already forming in front of Swatch stores. Whether they are there for the pocket watch or the spare parts, only time will tell.