It was May 15th 2026. Lim Jun Yu arrived outside a large imposing building. Official queueing would only begin at 7am the next day but by 4.30pm when he arrived, he was already 68th in line, he told The Straits Times. People had been camping since 1pm and they came armed with foldable chairs, portable chargers, blankets, 100PLUS. 

They weren’t queuing for BTS merch. Or the latest Executive Condo launch.

This was outside the ION Orchard mall, for the new Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collection. A pocket watch, one per customer per store.

The Royal Pop is a collaboration between Audemars Piguet (AP), one of the most respected names in watchmaking, and Swatch, the brand best known for making Swiss watches cheerful and accessible. A genuine AP Royal Oak will cost you anywhere from S$30,000 to well into six figures, and even then, you’d likely be put on a waitlist. The Royal Pop borrows the Royal Oak’s DNA, comes in eight bright colours, adds a lanyard, and sells for S$535-570. It is, depending on who you ask, either a democratisation of luxury or a very expensive Swatch.

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Collaborations between mainstream and luxury brands have become a fixture of modern retail—Adidas works with Stella McCartney, Uniqlo with Jil Sander. But most of these restock, they're widely available, and they don’t generate overnight queues or resale markets even remotely at the same level. What made the Royal Pop different was deliberate scarcity—forty watches per store, one per customer.

The world responded accordingly. In Hong Kong, someone told a reporter: “How many opportunities do you have in your lifetime to own an AP?” In Singapore, a more pragmatic solution appeared on Carousell—listings offering to queue on your behalf, for between S$40 and S$988. A scuffle broke out at ION Orchard over queue position. Someone wrote makeshift queue numbers on slips of paper. But by 10pm, none of that mattered. “People are just pushing their way to the front. True chaos,” it was reported. The next morning, watches that retailed for under S$600 were flipping online for over S$3,000.

The question of what things are worth is not new. Adam Smith puzzled over it in 1776. Why are diamonds—which no one needs—expensive, while water—which everyone needs—is cheap? Price and value, it turns out, are not the same thing. They never were.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton says, “Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The Royal Pop queue had both kinds of people—the ones who knew more or less what they wanted to re-sell it for on Carousell, and the ones who just wanted to own “something valuable” (in the words of one 18-year-old who was second in line outside ION). I used to think that Wilde’s line wants us to judge the first kind and sympathise with the second. These days, I’m not so sure.

Take the reseller, for instance. They queued (or paid someone to), bought the watch at retail, and sold it for five times the price by the next day. There is nothing irrational about what they did. Supply was artificially low, demand was high, and the gap between the retail and resale prices was too stark to ignore. From their perspective, not reselling would be the irrational thing to do. In other words, for the reseller, the value of the watch is its resale price. They are not in fact separate like Wilde’s quote might lead us to think. 

And it’s not hard to see why. Scarcity is one of the most powerful drivers of human desire. We want what we can’t have, and we want it even more when we think others want it too. Audemars Piguet and Swatch know this. They released forty watches per store and limited purchases to one per customer quite deliberately. If anyone knew the price of everything here, it was Audemars Piguet and Swatch. They created the conditions which made the re-selling inevitable.

Then there’s the person who queued, got the watch, and kept it. Let’s call them the terminal owner. They knew the resale value—everyone in that queue probably did—but they kept the watch anyway. One could argue that their behaviour is economically strange. They’ve paid retail for something with a known secondary market premium but have no plans to resell. Which means they’re essentially leaving money on the table and walking away.

But what did they actually buy? Why this S$535 Swatch and not a regular S$120 one? Part of it might be the watch itself, of course—there’s the Royal Oak silhouette, and then the lanyard that makes it feel intentionally casual despite its borrowed pedigree. But I don’t think that’s all of it. I wonder if it’s also something to do with the story they can then tell about themselves (and maybe also to themselves): I was there. I queued. I got one. I kept it. 

Maybe the thing that made the Royal Pop valuable to the terminal owner isn’t that different from why it’s valuable to the reseller. In both situations, the value comes from the scarcity created by Audemars Piguet and Swatch. Their sense of owning something of value depends in part on the fact that other people wanted it and couldn’t have it. Remove the queue, the chaos, the S$3,000 Carousell listings, and what do you have? A Swatch on a lanyard.

Which brings us back to Wilde. His cynic and his sentimentalist might not be that different—both are responding to the same manufactured desire. The reseller turns that collective desire into money; the terminal owner turns it into a story, an identity, a feeling of having been part of something. The same 18-year-old described the Royal Pop as a form of “subtle luxury” and said he was drawn to owning “something valuable.” He hadn’t decided which colour he wanted. He just knew he wanted the watch long before he knew which watch.

And yet most of us don’t sit neatly at either end. Some who kept the watch could also be monitoring the resale market. They might not have listed it immediately but maybe they were keeping the option open, waiting for the right moment or the right price. My husband is a vinyl collector. He buys records because he genuinely loves the music—the crackling when the needle hits the vinyl, the ritual of keeping each record in its sleeve, the richness of a good pressing. He is, by most measures, a terminal owner. But he also has a Discogs account where he tracks the market value of every album he owns. He has multiple pressings of the same album because different pressings command different prices in different markets. He’s also shared his account password with our daughter so that when she takes over his collection—he half-jokes that it’s her inheritance—she’ll know what she owns.

This is where conventional mental accounting breaks down. Usually, we keep different notions of value in different jars—the music lover’s jar and the market’s jar; the resale value jar and the intrinsic value jar—and they don’t mix. But my husband applies both frameworks to the same object simultaneously. There is no jar. And perhaps that’s the more real position—Wilde’s cynic and his sentimentalist don’t have to be two different people. The two impulses can be held at the same time, about the same objects, on the same day.

Which is perhaps what Wilde got slightly wrong. Most of us know both the price and the value—we just choose, moment to moment, which one to act on. The reseller chose the price. That 18-year-old chose the story. My husband doesn’t feel the need to choose.

He just worries that when he dies, I will sell his vinyl collection for what I think he paid for it.

Serene Koh is a behavioural scientist and director of the Behavioural Insights Team in Singapore. She also teaches behavioural science at the National University of Singapore. 

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