A new Swatch model is introduced, and a case study in overexcited ‘drop culture’ plays out

LONDON (AP) — In Paris, police deployed tear gas. In Milan, Italy, a fistfight erupted. In London, Singapore and New York, all-night queues snaked from the doors of Swatch stores — the latest examples of status-symbol “drop culture” to flash across the globe when status symbols and resale value collide.

The company at the center of it all, Swatch, no stranger to over-the-top retail outbreaks, said it was time to chill. The Swiss watchmaker said Monday that there’s no shortage of its Royal Pop pocket watch, a collaboration with Audemars Piguet’s luxury timepieces.

All for a “bioceramic” timekeeper that retails for around $400 — but perhaps more to the point, resells for thousands of dollars. By Monday, the candy-colored flex objects proliferated on eBay, with one boasting: “IN HAND!!! Swatch x AP Royal Pop,” for 3,055.58 British pounds ($4,092.31) “or Best Offer.”

It was the latest eruption in a generation-long trail of consumerist frenzy — both online and in the physical world — that has touched companies from Nike to Walmart to Apple as human beings race, sometimes frantically, to keep pace with buying trends and the potential for resale.

“It looks like people got crazy to get a Royal Pop to make money through resale, not because they are fans of the Swatch,” said Pierre-Yves Donze, a business history professor at Osaka University Graduate School of Economics. “People want money, especially. Royal Pop is not like a cool product, but a way to make easy money.”

That’s a change, he said in an email, from past product drops from Swatch and other brands that benefit from the reach of social media to create the appearance, at least, of overwhelming demand. Previously, he said, people spent the money on buzzy objects because “they wanted to have it in their collection.”

Swatch did not respond to a question about its products being resold way above retail. But in a statement to The Associated Press, the company pointed at demand and retailers. It said that in about 20 of Swatch’s 220 stores worldwide where the Royal Pop was launched, “challenges arose on launch day because the queues of interested customers were exceptionally long and the organization of some shopping malls was not sufficient to handle this level of turnout.”

An internet-fueled frenzy

On social media, the Royal Pop has received over 11 billion views since the launch, the statement said.

It compared the Royal Pop to that of the MoonSwatch launch during the pandemic in March 2022 in partnership with sister company Omega. Then, a similar swoon appeared to ensue: masked people could be seen on social media from Singapore to Sydney, running apparently to Swatch stores.

Swatch has more than four decades of experience with hype. In 1984, it suspended a 13-ton yellow Swatch from a building in Frankfurt, Germany, around the same time people started donning its innovative timekeepers that were mass produced, affordable and very different from traditional heirlooms. People old and young began wearing timepieces in “White Memphis” and “Chrono-tech,” with its primary color hands.

This past weekend, the Swatch store in festive Carnaby Street again drew a line of people, this time ahead of the release of the Royal Pop. A mob of several dozen blocked the sidewalk at the Swatch store on nearby Oxford Street on Sunday, just before it opened. Then police closed all Swatch stores in London and several other U.K. cities. News outlets around the world reported similar scenes, with shuttered stores in the Netherlands and a “mosh pit” vibe in New York’s Times Square.

In France, police used both tear gas grenades and tear gas spray to disperse crowds that gathered outside the country’s Swatch boutiques, the national police service said.

It said officers used gas grenades at the sprawling Westfield Parly 2 shopping mall west of Paris, where TV footage also showed officers with riot shields and helmets stationed outside the watchmaker’s outlet, its shutters down. Officers in the southeast city of Lyon also deployed a gas grenade when a crowd ignored repeated warnings to disperse on the city’s Bellecour public square, while municipal police in the southern city of Montpellier used tear gas spray, the police service said. It said crowds gathered peacefully outside Swatch outlets in other towns.

Swatch France posted on Instagram that “because of public security considerations,” its stores in a half dozen French locations were closed for the day.

Reassurances that supply will keep up with demand

The company, meanwhile, issued a statement assuring people that the Royal Pop will be available for months.

The pocket watch launched only in retail stores and was not available online — a risky move, some critics said, because the atmosphere was likely amped up by the big money at stake for the resellers in line. There were sporadic injuries reported as well as some arrests and property damage.

To many companies, the liability risk of the hype is too high.

“A lot of the streetwear drops and sneaker drops that used to happen when I was younger, all of them have moved online because of safety concerns,” said Odunayo Ojo, a London-based fashion and cultural critic, said on his YouTube channel, Fashion Roadman. Either Swatch “didn’t get the memo,” he said, underestimated the draw to the new product or strategically hyped the drop to pump sales.

“Swatch already has a track record of understanding how these things go,” Ojo said.

By Monday, the lines had died down, perhaps because, as onlookers near a Swatch store in Paris said, there were no Royal Pop watches left in stores. New shipments, they’d heard, were on the way.

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Associated Press journalists John Leicester and Oleg Cetinic in Paris contributed.