Hodinkee
Inside The Manufacture: A Behind-The-Scenes Look At The Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop
Last year I took a trip to Swatch's Sistem51 factory, and many people seemed to enjoy getting a glimpse of the other side of watchmaking that we typically don't glamorize. Industrialization, in a way very opposite from classic watchmaking, is a different kind of technical art entirely. It's diametrically opposed to the philosophies of construction and finishing that you would expect from a classic watchmaker or brand, but as a result, that visit was one of the most interesting manufacturing sites that I've ever seen. I had no idea that I'd be back so soon, but then again, I certainly would have no idea that a collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet would be around the corner. So a little more than a year later, I found myself back in Biel, Switzerland, right outside of Swatch headquarters, making my way back to the Swatch Museum (still some of the most fun you can spend in a watch museum), the Swatch Drive-Through shop right outside of Swatch headquarters, and finally making the drive back out into the Swiss countryside to go see some Swatch factory sites. Of course, this time, it was in the hopes of seeing how things might have changed with the addition of the Royal Pop as a product on the factory lines. This trip wasn't all just déjà vu, however. In my visit last year to the ETA Sistem51 site in Boncourt, it just so happened that the ETA site in Grenchen, responsible for the production of Swatch's Bioceramic composite, was under renovation. They were in the mi...
