Swatch Royal Pop Collection a Lesson in Trademark Brand Control

Audemars Piguet and Swatch’s new collaboration collection, Royal Pop, caught me off guard because the two brands seemed to occupy very different worlds.

At first, the partnership looked risky from a trademark perspective. Audemars Piguet’s octagonal bezel, Tapisserie dial pattern, and eight hexagonal screws are among the most recognizable design elements in luxury watches. Such design features can be protected as trade dress, a form of trademark that covers a product’s design when consumers see it as source-identifying. Making those designs accessible to a broader audience could appear to dilute their distinctiveness.

But when I looked more closely, a different story emerged.

In Japan, Audemars Piguet failed to register the Royal Oak watch-shape configuration with the Japan Patent Office, or JPO. In the US, the Trademark Trials and Appeals Board, or TTAB, refused the full configuration even after recognizing that some elements carried source-identifying significance.

Both decisions reveal the limits of protecting product design through registration.

This all makes Royal Pop look like strategic brand control and a way for Audemars Piguet to occupy the market on its own terms before lookalikes could do it. Royal Pop shows that modern trademark strategy isn’t limited to cease-and-desist letters and infringement lawsuits. For product designs, the strongest strategy may combine enforcement with proactive market participation.

The goal is control: leading the market with a brand’s own design instead of litigating the copies that follow it.

Hard to Own

Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak is iconic, but fame isn’t the currency of product design trade dress; proof and precision are. The legal question isn’t whether a design is famous or culturally important, but whether consumers view the specific claimed design as a source identifier. The doctrine sets two demanding thresholds.

First, product design is never inherently distinctive. In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc., the US Supreme Court held that product design is protectable only on a showing of secondary meaning, meaning its primary significance is to identify the product’s source.

Second, functionality is a hard limit. Under TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc., trademark law can’t protect functional features, and a feature may be functional if it is essential to the product’s use or affects its cost or quality. Courts guard against trade dress becoming a perpetual substitute for design patent protection.

Japan illustrates the proof problem. Audemars Piguet sought protection for its Royal Oak watch-shape configuration: a Tapisserie-pattern dial; an octagonal bezel with eight hexagonal screws; and the case, crown, and lug. The JPO refused the application for lack of inherent distinctiveness, and Japan IP High Court dismissed Audemars Piguet’s appeal in 2024, finding its watch design lacked inherent and acquired distinctiveness.

The TTAB found Audemars Piguet’s evidence showed acquired distinctiveness only for the octagonal bezel and eight hexagonal screw-head combination. The problem was scope: It sought registration for a broader three-dimensional configuration and declined to amend its drawings to exclude functional or insufficiently distinctive features.

Even Audemars Piguet, with strong rights in certain design codes, must clear major hurdles to secure trade dress protection, and success is far from guaranteed.

Evidence Matters

Audemars Piguet’s setbacks also show why evidence matters as much as brand recognition.

Showing that a design is famous isn’t enough; a brand must show that consumers recognize the specific claimed features as a trademark. That often turns on “look-for” advertising: advertising that teaches consumers to look for particular design features as signals of source.

This is a common gap for luxury brands, whose advertising tends to elevate the product as an object of desire, supported by house marks, collection names, celebrity associations, and editorial storytelling. That builds brand equity, but not the precise evidence trade dress protection requires.

Dilution Risk

Dilution is the risk luxury brands face when iconic design codes drift into market vocabulary. It comes in two forms. Blurring happens when a distinctive cue appears so widely that consumers stop linking it to one source. Tarnishment happens when the cue becomes tied to lower-quality or less prestigious goods, eroding the prestige that gave it value.

A bezel shape, pattern, silhouette, or hardware detail can each begin as a brand signature with source-identifying value. But as the market fills with similar designs, consumers may start reading the feature as a style rather than a source. Luxury enforcement works to preserve distinctiveness so a brand’s design cues don’t become generic.

This is why Royal Pop appears counterintuitive. Audemars Piguet is a family-owned, independent watchmaker whose prestige rests on scarcity and craftsmanship. A mass-market interpretation of its most recognizable design cues would seem to make them less exclusive.

Why would Audemars Piguet choose to broaden access to the very design it has spent years trying to protect? The answer is control.

Enforcement alone has limits. Litigation is expensive, slow, and reactive. By the time a brand sues, the market may already be crowded with lookalikes. The Royal Pop collaboration lets Audemars Piguet shape how its designs enter a broader market, on its own terms, rather than waiting for unauthorized copies to define that space first.

Legal Takeaways

Litigation still matters for trademark enforcement, but it shouldn’t be the entire strategy. Brands should consider taking several protective actions.

First, identify the design features worth protecting. A claim to the entire product may be weaker than a narrower claim to the specific features consumers actually recognize as source-identifying.

Second, build “look-for” evidence. Advertising shouldn’t only show the product; it should teach consumers to recognize specific features, such as a shape, pattern, or hardware detail, as coming from one brand.

Third, document consumer recognition before a dispute arises. Useful evidence includes consumer surveys, press coverage, social media references, brand guidelines, sales data tied to the specific design, and third-party references describing the design as a brand signature.

Finally, be proactive. Brands should act before lookalikes normalize the design. Once a market is crowded with similar products, it becomes harder for the brand to prove that consumers still connect the design to one specific source.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Judy Yen is an attorney at Omnus Law who advises emerging companies on trademark portfolio management, IP enforcement, and complex commercial transactions.

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