Audemars Piguet Goes High Jewelry: What It Means for Hiring

On October 2, in the middle of Paris Fashion Week, Audemars Piguet unveiled Royal Oak Joaillerie: nineteen pieces of high jewelry built from the bracelet of its most famous watch. Necklaces, chokers, cuffs, drop earrings, in gold and titanium, set with emeralds, sapphires and diamonds. Select clients had already seen them in Bangkok, Zurich and Saint-Tropez. Reported prices start around CHF 48,000 and climb to several million.

Chief executive Ilaria Resta has framed the collection as a showcase for one-of-a-kind pieces, not a volume play. That is true, and it is also beside the point for anyone who works in luxury retail. A watch house that has spent fifty years selling to collectors has decided to sell to a different client, in a different way, inside its own rooms. That changes who those rooms need.

Why a watchmaker wants to be a jeweler

Audemars Piguet is not under pressure. It grew roughly 10% organically in 2025 and makes about 53,000 watches a year. But the category it dominates is flat, and the one next to it is not.

Richemont's results show the gap in a single quarter. In the three months to June 2026, its jewelry maisons, led by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, grew 21% to €4.73 billion, a seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. Its specialist watchmakers grew 8%. Bain's Federica Levato put the client side bluntly: watchmaking is still largely male, and jewelry is the opposite. Resta's own explanation is more practical. Clients, she says, were already stacking Royal Oaks on the wrist and wearing them as jewelry.

Not a first date with jewelry

The house has history here. In the nineteenth century it made pendant and ring watches for Tiffany, Cartier and Bulgari. It set up its own jewelry workshop in the 1980s. In 2016 it worked with the Italian jeweler Carolina Bucci on the frosted gold Royal Oak, and in 2020 it began selling her K.I.S.S. line inside AP Houses in London, Hong Kong and Barcelona.

What is new is the signature. This is high jewelry under the Audemars Piguet name, co-designed with Nathalie Barzilay, priced against Place Vendôme rather than against a gold Royal Oak.

The stores already exist

The obvious question is whether Audemars Piguet will open jewelry stores. Nothing announced points that way, and it does not need to. Over the past decade the brand closed about three quarters of its points of sale, from nearly 400 in 2015 to fewer than 100, while revenue per door rose roughly tenfold. What replaced the multibrand counters is the AP House: an apartment-style salon, by appointment, built for long visits.

That format suits high jewelry far better than a watch counter ever could. The collection is going to selected AP Houses and boutiques, including New York, Los Angeles and Miami, and to private client events. The real question is not where it will be sold. It is who inside those rooms can sell it.

New York, London, Paris

The three cities that matter most to luxury hiring are also the three where this lands hardest. In New York, Audemars Piguet runs an AP House in the Meatpacking District, opened in 2022, and has announced a second in the city, a short walk from the talent pool on Madison Avenue. In London, UK sales reached £81.4 million in 2024, up 20%, from an AP House on New Bond Street, a Harrods boutique and a joint venture in Manchester, with a second London AP House under construction in Mayfair. The West End is about to have one more address hiring for the same narrow profile.

And Paris is where the brand chose to launch. Place Vendôme and the Golden Triangle hold the deepest bench of high jewelry sellers in the world. A watch house entering that category will look there first, wherever the actual seat is.

A necklace is not a Royal Oak

The sale is different in almost every respect. A Royal Oak advisor manages scarcity: a waiting list, an allocation, a mostly male client who already knows the reference. A high jewelry sale runs the other way. The client may be a woman buying for herself, a couple, or a collector who has never worn the brand. Pieces are one-of-a-kind or made to order. The conversation is about stones, provenance and proportion. The cycle runs through private viewings, travelling shows and events, and it can take months.

The houses that do this well staff for it: high jewelry specialists, gemologists, private client and events teams, and trainers who can teach a watch floor the language of stones. Expect Audemars Piguet to need the same, hiring partly from inside and partly from the jewelers it now competes with. That makes this one of the rare moments where a career in jewelry and watches crosses from one side of the category to the other.

What it means for high jewelry jobs

For candidates from jewelry houses, the opening is real. A watch brand with a growing salon network and a new high jewelry line needs people who already know how to sell a stone, and it will pay for a client book that includes women collectors. The roles sit closest to client development and senior sales. For watch advisors, the message is the reverse: gemological training and event selling are about to become a differentiator inside watch houses, not only outside them. Our salary guide shows how base and commission differ between the two categories, and current roles are on our jobs board.

The structure echoes a point we made about Patek Philippe: in the top tier of watchmaking, how a house sells decides who it hires. Patek delegates the floor to its dealers. Audemars Piguet took the floor back, and now it has to fill it with a skill it has never had to hire for at scale.

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