SUBDIAL EDITORIAL

AP is dead. Long live AP.

In the modern imagination, the story of Audemars Piguet is the story of the Royal Oak.

Ever since Gerald Genta sketched it in an all-night design session, the Royal Oak has been AP’s most recognisable watch. It’s no coincidence that Jean-Claude Biver has been obsessed with the Royal Oak throughout his career, despite only having worked at AP for one year.

It didn’t use to be this way, though.

Walk through the AP Museum in Le Brassus and you’d have to go through almost three-quarters of the exhibits before the iconic design rears its octagonal head. To get to the Royal Oak, you’d have to work through all manner of complicated wristwatches and pocket watches. Audemars Piguet was a complications specialist, with a track record of firsts: the first minute repeater wristwatch, the first jump hour wristwatch and the first skeletonised wristwatch, as well as the thinnest movement and the first perpetual calendar watch with a leap year indicator.

Royal Oak ref. 5402

By the 1970s Audemars Piguet was facing an existential threat in the form of the Quartz Crisis. While quartz watches were previously an expensive novelty, Japanese manufacturers began mass-producing accurate, readily available and affordable watches with quartz movements that meant the average person who needed a watch to tell the time no longer considered the more expensive, less reliable and less accurate Swiss watches.

Against the backdrop of this market turmoil, Georges Golay - the company’s Managing Director - commissioned Gerald Genta to design a stainless steel sports watch: the Royal Oak ref 5402. An order for 1,000 was made by the brand in steel, and another 100 in gold. For a business operating in such a tough environment, it was a huge investment.

The gamble didn’t pay off straight away. It took a few years for the new model to become a commercial success. The Royal Oak cost ten times more than a Submariner, and a heavy advertising push made it clear that the Royal Oak’s price was a marker of luxury.

Comparison of list prices in 1972. All prices are in Swiss Francs.

The growing popularity of the RO came as AP began to pare back its model families. The 2010s saw the disappearance of the Jules Audemars and Millenary families. Head to AP’s website today and you’ll see just one other model family - the Code 11.59.

The Royal Oak has become synonymous with Audemars Piguet, making up 85% of all AP listings on the secondary market and 91% of total value. Compare this to other brands and the difference is stark. The Submariner makes up 11% of secondary market Rolex value, while the GMT-Master and Daytona account for 10% and 25% respectively.

Secondary market share of AP versus Rolex model families

Interest in the Royal Oak has grown dramatically over the past 5 years, and it was at the forefront of the boom in secondary watch prices seen across the start of 2022. Prices climbed dramatically over a 3 month period, with prices for the 26331ST Chronograph Royal Oak jumping by 64%.

Price increases across Royal Oak models between December 2021 and March 2022.

But having so much of your brand tied to one model comes with risks.

AP is dead.

Watch models that rode the wave of the boom were also the biggest casualties of its subsequent fall. Royal Oak models stand out as one of the biggest losers across 2022 and into 2023.

Price declines for Royal Oak models

Out of the top seven “losers” between March 2022 and February 2023, four were Royal Oaks. Notably, no model from any other brand appears more than once in this list.

Top seven largest price declines between March 2022 and February 2023.

Many Royal Oak models saw prices fall below levels prior to the 2021 boom. The steady price increase during the pandemic as well as the price spike in early 2022 were wiped out, bringing numbers back to those seen back in early 2021. Whilst this rise and fall is in line with the wider market trend, Royal Oak prices have declined in a more pronounced way. When that one model family makes up over 90% of your secondary market presence, this really matters.

Secondary market value of Royal Oak models across 30 months.

Many Royal Oak references still trade for above retail prices, but the hype and culture of flipping that pervaded the community at the height of the boom has somewhat abated. A silver lining is that these watches are once again a realistic, if aspirational goal for real watch enthusiasts. 

Long live AP.

Look past the numbers and Audemars Piguet is much more than the Royal Oak. Cooling prices in the high-demand Sports market has led a more diverse range of watch models to catch collectors’ attention.

As Ben Dunn from Watch Brothers London puts it, “I believe that collectors who are collecting for the love of watches never stop learning and discovering, finding fulfilment in the sharing and scholarship with like minded others. This is leading to the organic discovery and shared passion for certain brands and models, most recently from the neo-vintage period.”

Neo-Vintage - timepieces from the 80s through to the mid-2000s - is growing in collectability.

The Neo-Vintage period offers diverse designs and decades of horological stories that are yet to be properly discovered, but it also offers value to budding collectors who have increasingly been priced out of other areas of collectability.

“[For] someone maturing from, say, their first sports watch to a dress complication”, says renowned AP collector James (@watches_and_guiness), “from a value perspective, [they] would be broadly more interested in a 5548 AP QP than a wildly expensive 3448 Patek QP.”

Audemars Piguet played a central role in the development of watchmaking across this period. Following the success of the Royal Oak, advances in computing technology made its way into manufacturing, and meant that designing and producing components started to become faster and cheaper. Far from making watchmakers redundant, automation gave designers and watchmakers more time to spend on the more intricate areas of production. Components were made by machine but finished by hand, producing some of the most exceptional movement finishing ever created. James argues that movement finishing reached levels "just not seen in modern offerings, given the costs of hand labour involved".

The skeletonised and engraved ultra-thin automatic movement.

The 1980s and 1990s were a period of collaboration. Today manufacturers boast that all areas of their watchmaking is in-house, but collaborative designs and ‘ebauche ‘ movements marked a period of innovation throughout the Neo-Vintage years. The result was exciting designs with rich and interwoven stories that often brought together famous innovators from all corners of the watch industry. 

Watches were made for the enthusiast and collector, rather than the everyday wearer. Closed casebacks made way for display backs that showed off a watchmaker’s hard work, while the concept of “Limited Edition” watches started to take hold. 

What made neo-vintage truly special from a modern collector’s perspective was that these watches “felt” vintage at the time. Their design wasn’t inspired by the psychedelic and sporty 70s watches of the previous decade, but rather from the mid-century, restrained styles of the 1940s and 1950s.

AP's flagship - the Perpetual Calendar

Some of Audemars Piguet’s most interesting watches come from this era. The very same man who commissioned the Royal Oak, Georges Golay, led the charge on creating an ultra-thin perpetual calendar that revolutionised the watchmaking landscape as much as the Royal Oak did.

The resulting ref. 5548 was conceived at a time where complicated watches were being made in mere handfuls each year. From 1924-1978, AP made fewer than 200 perpetual calendars in total. They were difficult to design and create, and more importantly just weren't in demand. They were thought of as old-fashioned display pieces

Perpetual Calendar ref. 5548

The 5548 changed this perception. It was built on the ultra-thin automatic cal. 2120 - ironically the same movement that powered the Royal Oak. This made it much more wearable, but was also a statement that AP was investing in complicated watchmaking, something which it had historically been known for. According to Ben, “...the neo-vintage period is undeniably intertwined with complicated watchmaking led by the likes of AP with the release of their ultra thin complications in the late 70’s, followed by many incredible creations/complications through the 2000’s.”

The number of watches built using the 2120/8000 movement (perpetual calendar) totalled 7,219. It was a testament to the technical innovation that meant perpetual calendars - long thought to be one of watchmaking’s most difficult complications - could be made at such scale. In 1984, the ref. 5548 alone accounted for 675 out of 1,066 perpetual calendars in Switzerland, showing its dominance over the market.

The technological prowess of the 5548 made way for the artistic expressionism of the 25657 and its related models. While identical inside, many examples featured impressive use of traditional dial finishing techniques such as guilloche, hand-hammering, and skeletonisation. James’ collection shows off this range, with a hand-hammered “Tuscan” dial and a skeletonised perpetual calendar.

To get a sense of how far ahead of the pack AP was, their “Tuscan” perpetual calendar - itself a spin on the ref. 5448 - came out before Patek Philippe even released the first 3940. Compared to the traditional Patek Philippe, it felt outright revolutionary in its presentation of complicated watches.

A stealthier relative of the 5448, the ref. 25661, has an open caseback showing off an artisanally finished movement. The dial features Breguet numerals, uncommon for this model, and while there’s thought to be 37 examples in platinum with open caseback, only 5 were ever made in this exact configuration. This reflected the wider shift of watches going from being essential time-telling tools to objects of luxury. 

Another rare QP in James’ collection is the “Clover”, which has a solid platinum bezel with a clover leaf-shaped cutout. Across its four-year production run, only 123 were made in total, with 13 cases fashioned from platinum. It’s believed that the platinum examples were all retailed by the legendary retailer Asprey, explaining with the signature on the caseback. 

Unusual Complications

The perpetual calendar wasn’t the only complication AP dipped into its archives to find. The company took a much more adventurous approach to picking novel complications to recreate. One of these was the “Star Wheel”. It’s definitely an unusual way of telling the time, having three “wandering” wheels (which is where it gets its other name of “Wandering Hours” from) that was taken from a clock produced for Pope Alexander XII in 1656 in Rome. 

It was brought back after the team at AP had a chance encounter with a watchmaking journal detailing this clock. The “Star Wheel” name came from the shape of the wheels holding the discs on the dial.

Another unusual complication revived by AP was the Jump Hour. Unlike a normal watch with an hour hand, this watch has a window at 12 o’clock that shows the time in numbers. It’s become somewhat of a signature for AP to combine the jump hour with a minute repeater movement, which chimes the time when the slide at 9 o’clock is pulled. This example has a diamond bezel and mother-of-pearl dial, features which have often, in the modern watch world, been associated exclusively with women’s watches. Historically this couldn’t be further from the truth, with unisex watches being adorned with gemstones and exotic dial materials as a sign of craftsmanship. This ref. 25723 is an example of that, with a stunning blue MoP dial that dances and shifts in the light. More than that, it’s a 1/1 “piece unique”.

A blank canvas

Audemars Piguet was unique for taking a design-led approach to haute horlorgerie. Unlike its neo-vintage rivals, AP wasn’t afraid to artistically experiment. Watchmakers were no stranger to techniques like enamelling on dials, but this was usually a separate category of watchmaking. Very few watchmakers had combined complex artistic designs with complications - perhaps there was a reluctance to dilute the impact of a complicated movement with an equally impressive case and dial. 

The most extraordinary watch might be the “Ferrari”, created to pay homage to the legendary Ferrari 315 S that Wolfgang von Trips drove during the 1957 Mille Miglia. The gold and silver dial is three-dimensional, and hand-crafted by a skilled artisan. While it’s already a spectacularly rare watch, this one takes it to the next level with a massive platinum bracelet matched only by the double diamond bezel, featuring both baguette and brilliant gems. To top it off, it's got a solid platinum bracelet that drapes beautifully across the wrist. It's only once they've all been assembled, however, that you get the full, jaw-dropping package.

Throughout its long history, Audemars Piguet was known for its expertise in complicated watchmaking. It leveraged this heritage during the Quartz Crisis, launching a renaissance of fine watchmaking that combined the best of new manufacturing technology with time-honed finishing techniques and classical designs. From exotic dials to esoteric complications, the growing interest in neo-vintage AP shows that despite the market cooldown on the Royal Oak, AP’s story is far from over.

A special thanks to James (@watches_and_guinness) for spending time showing his collection and Ben (@watchbrotherlondon) for his insight.