Audemars Piguet debuts its first jewelry line, built on the Royal Oak bracelet

Audemars Piguet launched its first jewelry collection on 1 October, in the middle of Paris Fashion Week. The Royal Oak Joaillerie line runs to 19 pieces: necklaces, earrings, cuffs and chokers. None of them is a watch, and that is the point.

The suite is named for the maison's famous 1970s sports watch and takes its design codes directly. The interlocking links of the Royal Oak bracelet, with its mix of polished and brushed finishes that plays with light, become the skeleton of the jewelry.

The pieces combine gold and titanium, set with precious and non-precious stones. The inspiration is the Vallée de Joux, the watchmaking valley where Audemars Piguet lives: its frozen lakes, its forests and its flowers all show up as motifs.

The statement pieces

The Dream of Joux necklace is the anchor piece, a tie-style design in white gold and anodized blue titanium. It carries 42 pear-shaped diamonds of about 63 carats in total, plus 1,670 blue sapphires of over five carats altogether.

The matching earrings are topped with eight pear-shaped diamonds, each between 1.5 and 3 carats, and set off by 196 blue sapphires. The Risoud Eclipse necklace and cuff, named after a local forest, turn to emeralds in blackened titanium and white gold.

The necklace carries five sugarloaf emeralds of around 16.5 carats in total; the cuff holds three emeralds of around 12 carats, both sprinkled with diamonds. These colored stones answer a wider shift in fine jewelry toward emeralds and sapphires over white diamonds alone.

Six bejeweled cuffs nod to the landscape around the manufacture. A Sunburst Royal Oak cuff sprays orange and yellow sapphires with spessartites. The Blueberries cuff is more literal, a branch rendered in 506 leaf-shaped and brilliant-cut diamonds, 19 amethyst cabochons and 16 black spinel cabochons.

The everyday pieces come in Frosted Gold, the hammered shimmer Audemars Piguet pioneered with jeweler Carolina Bucci in 2016. These chokers and cuffs are made to pair with a client's existing Royal Oak watch on the wrist. The finish has become coveted among collectors.

Why the watchmaker went into jewelry

The move is less of a leap than it looks. Since the 19th century Audemars Piguet has made pendant and ring watches alongside jewelers like Tiffany, Cartier and Bulgari. The house opened its own jewelry workshop in the 1980s.

For its 125th anniversary it produced the Baroque cuff watch set with diamonds and yellow and pink sapphires. Collectors will also remember the punk-styled Diamond Trilogy secret watches of 2015 to 2017. In our ranking of the best luxury watch brands, Audemars Piguet is in the holy trinity with Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.

Jewelry is the brighter corner of a muted luxury market right now. Morgan Stanley cut its 2026 sector growth estimate to 2.5 percent in May. Against that, customers are trading fashion for jewelry as a store of value, helped along by strong gold prices.

Richemont shows the split clearly. Its jewelry maisons grew 24 percent in the quarter ending 30 June, while its watchmakers grew 8 percent. That is the gap Audemars Piguet is walking into with this collection.

The spark came from the house's own clients, said chief executive Ilaria Resta, pointing to the popularity of the 23 mm Royal Oak Mini. "We saw clients stacking and wearing them almost as jewelry," she said of the small watches.

"We wanted to explore that design language in a new form," Resta added. "Rather than reproducing familiar Royal Oak codes, we looked at the bracelet almost as an object in its own right and asked how its geometry, rhythm and movement could translate into jewelry."

Audemars Piguet has long worked to diversify beyond the Royal Oak, adding dials and complications to its round Code 11.59 over the years. A dedicated jewelry line built on the icon is a different basket, and one with a clearer growth path behind it.

Watches start around $17,000 at the maison and the most expensive pieces pass $100,000. Jewelry extends the brand into self-purchase, a market where women are increasingly their own biggest customers. Resta signalled this is only the beginning.

The house expects to expand Royal Oak Joaillerie the way it expanded the watch. Jewelry gives the rule-breaking streak the brand is known for a new canvas, and the collection is its opening stroke, with more pieces likely to follow.