At 9 am, as stores opened, London’s Carnaby Street location lasted half an hour before police were called. In New York, fights broke out amid rumors of a stabbing in the line. At locations around the world, police had to assist staff as the vast majority of customers left empty-handed as most of the shops had fewer than 200 watches available. Deals were done within queues as scalpers flipped watches for profit. Within minutes of the first sales, the plastic watches were hitting eBay for thousands of dollars.

This is not what a description of what happened during Saturday's Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop launch, this is an account of the 2022 MoonSwatch launch. But a carbon copy of this chaos and mayhem ensued as Swatch stores opened worldwide on May 16 to sell their extremely limited numbers of Royal Pop pocket watches.

Responding to widespread criticism of how Swatch handled the 2022 MoonSwatch launch, Nick Hayek Jr., chief executive of Swatch Group, told WIRED at the time: “We knew for sure this would be a success, because the product is beautiful, provocative, high quality, and the price is fantastic... But what happened … I think nobody in the world could have expected that. It was really crazy.”

Hayek's defence was essentially that Swatch could not be held accountable for disturbances so severe some stores were forced to shut for 10 days to let the pandemonium play out, simply because the group could never have predicted the ferocious public reaction to an affordable version of an iconic luxury timepiece coming on sale. No such excuse can be offered this time for the calamitous Royal Pop launch that took place this weekend.

Chaos Foreshadowed

Even before the first stores opened in Singapore on Saturday, 12 hours ahead of New York, the clear pattern of what was to follow was established. The VivoCity branch was shuttered ahead of the much-anticipated launch, with Swatch issuing a statement that it was "due to the overwhelming crowd” and that this decision was taken with local authorities to ensure the health and safety of staff and customers.

Then it was Dubai. “In view of safety considerations, we have decided not to proceed with the sale of the [Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop] at Dubai Mall and Mall of the Emirates and the event has been cancelled”, a statement said. Authorities in New Delhi and Mumbai closed Swatch Store openings citing a lack of crowd control threatening safety. “We are not animals,” crowd members were caught shouting on Instagram clips.

London stores shut, and police dogs deployed. Elsewhere in the UK, in Birmingham, news reports spoke of “fights and knives” and drug taking before police were called. A “mosh pit” developed outside stores in the Netherlands. Clashes in Dusseldorf. Officers fired teargas to control a 300-strong crowd outside a Swatch shop in Paris. Open brawling occurred in Milan. Then arrests and shutdown in Miami. Houston's store closed, as well as Chicago. In Long Island, New York, amazingly, pepper spray was used for crowd control. In store-front interviews, customers made clear their anger towards Swatch on how poorly the release was handled.

Eventually, around 2pm EST, a staggering 17 hours after the first clear warning signs in Singapore, Swatch finally issued a statement on its Instagram page: “To all our dear fans worldwide of our AP x Swatch collab, launched on May 16. To ensure the safety of both our customers and our staff in Swatch stores, we kindly ask you not to rush to our stores in large numbers to acquire this product. The Royal Pop Collection will remain available for several months. In some countries, queues of more than 50 people cannot be accepted, and sales may need to be paused.”

Looking at almost any of the 45,000 comments on the post, the response to the brand from fans is crystal clear: Swatch had done far too little, far too late. “You intentionally put people in danger causing a frenzy knowing how many watches you sent to each location but allowing thousands of people to line up was negligent”, “Shame on you Swatch”, “Swatch did bad - they should have gotten ahead of this knowing the depth of inventory and allocation rather than putting stores and customers at risk”, and on the replies go.

AP Wanted a Safe, Positive Experience

WIRED contacted Swatch asking why, considering the wealth of evidence from the ill-received MoonSwatch launch, did it repeat the rollout strategy with the AP collaboration. We got this response from their communications team in Switzerland blaming shopping mall security, despite incidents at Swatch's own stores outside of malls.

“The Royal Pop Collection has been phenomenal worldwide, and demand is extremely high. In around 20 Swatch stores out of a total of 220 stores globally 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,” the statement says.

In the statement, Swatch even admits the weekend's happening are “similar to the first day of the MoonSwatch launch in March 2022” and that “the situation has now normalized somewhat after the launch day”.

The note from the communications team then, quite remarkably, lists some stats in an attempt to paint the launch in a positive light, as opposed the retail bin-fire it seemingly was: “We have received millions of clicks on our website. This new collaboration is literally making social media explode, with over 6 billion views within one week; by now, it is already 11 billion. All in all, the Royal Pop Collection is captivating the entire world, not least because the Royal Pop is, quite surprisingly, not a wristwatch.”

Audemars Piguet seems unhappy with how Swatch has handled the launch of its collaboration on the Royal Pop. AP told WIRED that “we understand the questions around the Royal Pop launch experience. As retail operations are handled by Swatch and their local teams, Swatch is best placed to comment on the operational handling of the launch. From AP’s perspective, safety and a positive experience for clients and teams remain the priority.” The brand did not respond when asked if it considered Swatch's handling of the Royal Pop launch a “safe and positive experience”.

The madness of the Royal Pop launch is that, considering all that could have been learned from the MoonSwatch release in 2022, Swatch decided to repeat the playbook that went so badly wrong four years ago. This is a move, according to experts, that was entirely avoidable and utterly unnecessary.

Hype With No Control

“Luxury drops cannot rely on surprise, scarcity and social frenzy as the strategy, then act surprised when human behaviour follows,” says Kate Hardcastle, author of The Science of Shopping and advisor to brands including Disney, Mastercard, Klarna and American Express. “Retailers are already dealing with heightened tensions around theft, aggression and crowd management globally. Add a highly restricted product, long queues, resale economics, social media amplification and the emotional intensity attached to luxury access, and the environment can escalate very quickly if not expertly managed.”

Hardcastle confirms that what is particularly difficult for Swatch here is that the MoonSwatch launch already provided a live blueprint of the risks. “Once a brand has experienced scenes involving crowd surges, disappointment and policing,” she says, “the obligation shifts from reacting to proactively engineering a safer customer experience. Successful luxury houses increasingly control the experience with far greater precision.”

Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at Global Data, is even more candid. “The chaos does not reflect well on Swatch, and it probably makes Audemars Piguet wonder what on Earth it has gotten itself into,” he says. “Wanting to create some hype is understandable, but not being able to control it becomes damaging both commercially and for the brand image. Swatch should understand this better than most as it has been through this before with MoonSwatch.”

Not only Saunders and Hardcastle, but scores of commenters on Swatch's Instagram post, point out well-known and obvious solutions that would have mitigated or entirely avoided the Royal Pop's shambolic release.

“We have seen other premium or limited launches use staggered collection windows, verified appointment systems, geo-ticketing, VIP allocation tiers, timed QR access, private client previews and controlled queue technology to reduce volatility while preserving excitement,” says Hardcastle, adding that some combine digital ballots with curated in-store experiences so consumers feel part of an occasion rather than participants in a scramble.

Saunders agrees: “What they should have done here is control the crowds with things like digital ticketing and appointments,” he says. “They could have also pre-dropped more online to reduce some of the tension at stores. Swatch should also make stock levels and availability clear. But there is a tension here—they want to create a story of scarcity as it drives up demand and interest.”

WIRED asked Swatch to clarify why it chose to repeat the strategy of 2022 and MoonSwatch and not implement staggered collection windows, online sales or digital ticketing, but got no reply.

“The bottom line is that while Swatch and Audemars Piguet have gotten a lot of free publicity from this, it isn’t a good look,” Saunders says.

Hardcastle lays blame on both Swatch and AP as well. “Brands get into difficulty when scarcity becomes the dominant marketing mechanic without enough operational infrastructure behind it. There's a shared responsibility here. Swatch controls the retail environment, but Audemars Piguet’s brand gravity and cultural desirability are part of what fuels the intensity. When two globally recognizable names combine, the planning has to reflect not just product demand but crowd psychology,” she says.

“The challenge for brands is balancing excitement with duty of care. Retail theatre is powerful. Chaos is not.”