Debating Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept Black Panther

Following the recent watchmaking activity linked with Watches & Wonders among other things, well I decided that we will come up with a series of pretty short video reports summarising the main news and you know us, we will naturally focus a little bit more on the independent brands, but don’t worry we will do our best to cover as much as possible the rest.

We had the opportunity of seeing it in the flesh, it came here to the club, but it didn’t come alone and on totally diametrically different approach, we also had the visit of the stunning and hardcore classical Royal Oak Platinum Jumbo with green dial. Simply hot!

AP recently announced a new partnership with Marvel Entertainment and this watch marks the first iteration of this collaboration where you will find a white gold hand-painted sculpture of the famous figurine encased in this new Concept watch, 42mm in width compared to previous 44mm and 38.5mm versions fo the Royal Oak Concept watches. It comes in a sandblasted and brushed titanium case with satin-brushed inserts, holds a 3Hz flying tourbillon with 72 hours of power reserve, is hand-wound and in terms of finishing you will find quite a variety there giving it a very contemporary feel to it.

This watch shows that AP doesn’t necessarily take itself too seriously and for such a respected brand I don’t see this as being a bad thing. In a certain way, it reminds me when Richard Mille came with the “bonbon” collection, which I believe was quite a powerful statement by RM at the time and there’s a bit of that with this new Concept, especially that we are most definitely in for some other versions in the future, the Marvel galaxy is quite a large one! 

And for this edition alone we are are talking of a limited edition of 250 pieces priced at 150,000 Swiss Francs and sold in AP boutiques, so quite easy to do the maths and though some could say that 250 pieces is quite a lot, well I’m pretty sure that they will manage to sell at least most of them, especially that a hand-engraved unique version was put on auction for a charitable cause and this piece reached a staggering price of 5.2 Million USD! That’s a lot of money, actually the most and by far for any AP watch and this simply accentuates the hotness of the brand even though we don’t necessarily know all the details behind this, but in terms of communication, well it’s definitely occupying space and sends a very reassuring signal. 

So to summarise things, do I personally like this watch? Not really my kind of thing. Do I think it’s well made? For sure. Did AP take a risky decision doing this? I doubt, ok might shock purists, but ultimately won’t hurt them at all and opens up the brand to a new audience. Could a group company watch brand take the same risk/decision? Most certainly not. Is it fun? Yes and we need a bit of fun here and there, especially that more or less at the same time AP introduced a special full platinum green dialled Jumbo Royal Oak and you couldn’t find yourself so diametrically opposed to all we just discussed and I like this dichotomy. This watch is pure Royal Oak, it feels heavy, it feels serious and rigorous and we already know that at even at 100’000 Swiss francs a pop, they will sell like crazy and the tough call now for AP is how to allocate them to people that will actually enjoy the watch and not just flip them around.

Ok this is it for the video of the day, really looking forward to your comments, I think I will have a good time reading this and just for info those were not the only two watches presented by AP, there were plenty of other ones which I hope we’ll soon be able to come back to, for instance and listen to this; I really want to see in the flesh one of the new Code 11:59!

Anyhow, thanks for watching, thanks for the interaction and Viva JUMBO Watchmaking!