Serena Williams has been an ambassador for Audemars Piguet (AP) since 2014. Now, she has her very own watch — a culmination of the tennis star’s partnership with the brand and sports’ ongoing infiltration into luxury.
The 38mm Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph is built for sport, with a precise elapsed-time feature and feminine touches like mother-of-pearl accents, a brush of pink and ceramic features. It’s part of Audemars Piguet’s approach to collaborations, bringing in relevant cultural heavyweights to expand the 150-year-old watch brand’s horizons and introduce it to new customers.
“We collaborate with people who, in a way, offer us something more, people we can learn from. We don’t do collaborations just for the sake of it,” says Audemars Piguet CEO Ilaria Resta.
“And I’m glad that this one is with a woman. We had many collaborations in the past, especially on sport watches, mainly with men.
So this is a way to open the door, in line with our strategies, to a more diverse clientele and partners.”
Like the rest of the watch industry, appealing to more women consumers is top of mind. But Resta says it’s not exclusively a women’s watch.
“I’m sure this watch will be on the wrist of men and women alike, because what is clear is that this narrative of women’s watches, men’s watches — for me, it does not exist. Even watches that have been designed with a woman in mind have been purchased and worn by men as well,” Resta says.
The executive, who joined in January 2024, spent three years at perfumery DSM-Firmenich prior to Audemars Piguet. Before that, she spent 22 years at Procter & Gamble, working across brands like Pantene. The Royal Oak series dates back to 1972, when the Swiss watchmaker first introduced an elevated stainless steel sport watch. The company is now estimated to report $3.4 billion in annual sales, according to industry estimates.
Here, Resta shares her outlook on the watch industry and why the collaboration with Williams is so significant.
Vogue: This isn’t solely a women’s watch, but it’s geared toward women. What white space do you see there in getting more women on board as customers?
We have a huge opportunity to increase our client base of women. I also think the way we are working now is much more open-minded in the sense that we don’t necessarily have a brief when we collaborate with people. The idea comes organically from conversations. And when you don’t have a brief, actually, you are much more open to ideas. So I’m really trying to push for what I call “creative audacity”.
Normally, there is this approach of, ‘OK, we need to launch something, let’s have a product brief, let’s meet with the designer.’ But that’s not the way I like to work. I like to create and nourish meaningful relationships with artists, with sports people, with any talent that has a point of view.
It doesn’t need to be an expert on design at all, but from the conversation, you have an insight, an idea that then we can nourish together and nurture together.
I also don’t like it when a proposal comes fully fledged, and we need to execute in a certain way. This is not the way we like to work.
We like to have debates, because it’s from the exchange of ideas that we learn. So I’m on this fluid approach to collaborations that honestly takes a lot of time and a lot of investment to make because it’s not on a deadline basis.
It depends on the big idea, even if it takes two, three, five years to realize. We wait for the good ideas to come.
Vogue: The collaboration with Serena Williams comes off the heels of a huge collaboration with Swatch that had a crazy, big response. Were you expecting that result?
Before talking results, let me tell you why we did it. The idea came very early in my tenure at AP, and it came from observing what was happening in the watchmaking market, specifically to mechanical watches. When you look at mechanical watches for 50, 60 years, they’ve gone through all the possible disruptions. It’s a category that shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t offer a functional benefit.
There are less and less people using analog mechanical watches. Less people know how to read time on an analog watch. And this industry, for me, was going through an existential crisis, because yes, we are doing extremely well at Audemars Piguet, and don’t forget we sell in the range of 50,000 watches per year. So the top of the pyramid is doing well, but we’re talking very few pieces.
So through curiosity, people start thinking, ‘I want to learn about it’. And when you learn about mechanical watches, you fall in love with mechanical watches.
But the challenge was: how do we explain to the world the beauty of watches? Not many people own a Picasso, right?
But everybody knows the value of that Picasso. So we thought, let’s partner with the company that created this massive education back in the ’70s and ’80s: Swatch Group.
And the idea was to create something that is playful, that is designed to create and spark interest in mechanical watches with a manual winding movement, so it requires people to wind it every 90 hours; otherwise, the watch stops.
After the Swatch launch, we reached something like almost 20 billion impressions. People before didn’t even know what Audemars Piguet was, because let’s not forget, we talked to a very, very small percentage of the population.
And all of a sudden, everybody knew about Audemars Piguet. Everybody knew and understood what a mechanical watch was.
Our website crashed. And ever since, we’ve had record sales in June, July, August, and now in September.
There is not a single month where we’re not breaking new highs in terms of interest and in sales.
Vogue: What role do these collaborations play in your broader strategy?
This is an industry where we either innovate or die. It is an industry that requires being always in the cultural zeitgeist.
We need to continue earning relevance and love from people. Because once again, we are not a necessary item.
There are so many better ways to tell the time than a mechanical watch. We now have very young [people] collecting watches.
It was not the case a few years ago when collection was happening at a much higher age, more mature people. Now we see younger generations going through sometimes the secondary market to start building their collection.
There are podcasts about watchmaking, books, exhibitions. That’s why we do more and more exhibitions, and that’s why our retail concept is all about opening the door for education.
So even the concept of retail for Audemars Piguet is changing; our stores are no longer places of transaction, but places for engagement.
Vogue: Sport is infiltrating fashion. How did this influence the collaboration with Serena?
Sport is becoming part of our identity and is blending with fashion. It is no longer just performance. There is definitely the competition side, but also there is a deep dive into the athletes, the life and the resilience required to succeed in sport.
Athletes are becoming influencers in fashion and beauty, which makes sense because we identify with people we respect for the lives they lead. And I like that different categories are all blending together now.