This Saturday, Swatch is dropping the ‘Royal Pop’: its collaboration with Audemars Piguet. For context: Audemars Piguet makes the Royal Oak, one of the most recognizable luxury watches ever designed. Octagonal case, integrated bracelet, hand-finished steel. A base model starts at $20,000 to $30,000, if you can get your hands on one at retail, which has historically required the kind of relationship capital most people don’t have and can’t acquire. Swatch makes colorful neon-plastic watches starting at ~$50. You know Swatch.

We’ve seen this movie before. In March 2022, Swatch did the same thing with Omega’s Speedmaster Moonwatch, a watch that retails around $7,000, releasing a bioceramic version at $260 and watching the watch world lose its mind. Swatch CEO Nick Hayek confirmed more than one million units sold by November 2022. Secondary market prices averaged $900 in the first days after launch, with outliers clearing $1,000. The MoonSwatch became the best-selling watch release in StockX history. More interestingly, Omega Speedmaster sales also rose more than 50% following the launch.

The MoonSwatch sold aspiration at a price point anyone could reach, and it was completely honest about what it was. The buyer wasn’t claiming to own a Speedmaster. They were in on something. That transparency is what produced lines around city blocks.

As I read coverage of the upcoming AP x Swatch collab and ribbed a buddy who runs a watch club and owns several APs, an interesting question arose: has any other industry has attempted the same thing: a mass market brand partnering with an elite, inaccessible one, priced for participation, letting aspiration do the heavy lifting.

The answer is ‘yes.’ Education tried this. It’s called Coursera.

The structural parallel is almost exact. Elite institution plus mass market platform. Prestigious name at an accessible price. Millions of people who could never get through the door now able to buy something with the logo on it.

The scale is real. Emeritus, which runs branded programs for Harvard, Wharton, MIT, and more than 80 other universities, generated $474 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025. Coursera did ~$760 million across >183 million registered learners. Harvard’s total continuing and executive education operation generated nearly $600 million across the university in 2024, representing about 9% of Harvard’s total operating revenue, ~on par with what Harvard receives in federal research funding. Harvard Business School’s executive programs alone brought in $253 million in FY2025. And HBS Online contributed ~$70 million from approximately 42,000 online learners in FY2024.

The marketing language is worth reading closely. Emeritus describes its Wharton programs as helping participants acquire “advanced skills from a top-ranked business school, providing a distinct competitive advantage” — language that implies equivalence without quite claiming it. MIT xPRO’s certificate program pages state that “you will receive digital certificates from MIT xPRO,” the word “from” is doing heavy lifting. Coursera’s homepage tells prospective learners that its credentials are “issued directly by trusted institutions.” Harvard Business School Online instructs certificate-earners to add their credential to LinkedIn under the Education section, with the school listed as “Harvard Business School Online” and the degree field as “Other; Certificate in [Course Name].” The reality: LinkedIn says Harvard Business School has 3 million alumni, whereas Harvard Business School Online has only 95,000. The problem: Harvard Business School only graduates ~1000 people per year.

That instruction, to file all kinds of lightweight online certificates under a single ‘Education’ bucket, is where things get complicated.

In August 2025, a LinkedIn user ran an experiment: adding a fake Harvard degree to their profile to see what happened. Recruiter messages increased. Connection requests arrived praising the academic background. A lawyer eventually intervened. The experiment went viral. The comment sections were full of people who recognized the dynamic from their own feeds. A tech executive named Andrew Yeung posted something that circulated widely: “If your LinkedIn says you went to Harvard/Stanford/MIT but all you did was take a virtual, 6-week self-paced course, , then people are likely going to question everything else on your profile.” The MBA-focused subreddits have entire threads debating whether listing Wharton for a $550 Coursera certificate is misrepresentation or fair use of the platform’s own instructions.

None of this is straightforwardly anyone’s fault. Ashwin Damera, co-founder of Emeritus and himself a 2005 Harvard MBA, described the company’s founding mission as giving professionals “access to an affordable Ivy League business education like I had many years ago.” That is a legitimate ambition. MIT President Reif said as early as 2015 that expanding online programming “could help subsidize the institution.” That is a real institutional need.

The problem is structural. The business model requires a credential. But this credential requires a little bit of ambiguity about what exactly it signifies. This ambiguity produces a secondary market in borrowed prestige. Harvard wanted to share knowledge and earn revenue, for which it needed to sell something.

In watchmaking, the secondary market runs on desire. In education, it runs on confusion.

The MoonSwatch is a watch. It tells time. You wear it on your wrist. From across the room it may look a little bit like a Speedmaster. The aspiration transfers through the object itself.

A Coursera or Emeritus certificate is a digital credential. Its value depends entirely on what the reader believes it signifies, which turns out to vary considerably depending on whether the reader went to business school, works in HR, or is just someone scrolling a LinkedIn feed with limited patience for fine print.

This is the structural problem that makes the education version so much harder. The Royal Oak’s cultural weight: its story, its aesthetic, its fifty years of horological mythology, can be placed inside a $400 plastic case and handed to someone. They own it. It exists in the world as the thing it claims to be.

The Harvard brand’s actual value: the network built over years, the credential that employers have been pattern-matching for decades, the identity that comes from being selected at an 11% acceptance rate, cannot be placed inside a $300 online certificate. What transfers is the name. A name without the underlying asset behind it is aspiration in a format nobody can independently verify.

The MoonSwatch buyer knows exactly what they’re holding and is proud of it. The Edx/Coursera/Emeritus buyer files the certificate under ‘Education’ and waits to see if anyone looks closely. One is participation. The other is performance.

The watch industry learned something real: aspiration is a scalable product when you are honest about what you are selling. The ‘Royal Pop’ will either validate this lesson or complicate it depending on what exactly is launched on Saturday. The education industry has been trying to learn it since 2012 and keeps losing the plot at the credential, because the business model requires the credential, the credential requires the ambiguity, and the ambiguity requires someone to clean it up eventually.

Here, as a thought experiment, are three collabs that would do it honestly. They don’t exist. Perhaps they should 😜

Harvard x Duolingo. While more than 10 million people have maintained a consecutive 365-day Duolingo login streak, most are not measurably more fluent in their target language than when they started. They have simply kept the streak alive, because the app’s founder has described the mechanic as designed to exploit loss aversion rather than deepen learning. The overall course completion rate sits below 1%. Duolingo does not make most of its users fluent, but it does make them feel like they’re trying.

The product: $99 a year, real Harvard faculty lectures delivered in streak format, with an owl that sends notifications when you haven’t listened to your John Rawls lecture in four days — “Disappointed.” The credential is called a Harvard Certificate of Intellectual Participation. It’s beautifully framed, fit for putting up on the living room wall, and looks like a real Harvard diploma until you look closely. Harvard faculty write furious op-eds. Sales explode. The owl will be disappointed in most of its users. Nobody pretends otherwise.

Wharton x Hormozi. Alex Hormozi has sold more than 5 million copies of his ‘$100M Offers’ series and reportedly moved roughly 2.8 million copies of his third book in a single day, claiming a Guinness World Record in the process. He has 4.17 million YouTube subscribers and 985 million total views. His audience would very much like a Wharton association. Wharton would very much like to reach people who learned about unit economics from YouTube.

The product: a co-branded “$100M MBA” workbook that retails at $149. It says “in partnership with the Wharton School” on the cover. Every Wharton alumnus with a corner office photo on their LinkedIn simultaneously has a seizure. But nobody pretends it’s an MBA.

MIT x LEGO. This one requires the least imagination, because it is already basically real. MIT and LEGO have been formal research partners since the 1980s. The MIT Media Lab holds an endowed chair called the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research. The lab co-developed LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch, and multiple robotics kits. MIT reportedly maintains approximately one million LEGO bricks on campus for active research.

The product: a LEGO set built around an actual MIT research problem, sells at Target for $59. It would be the most honest version of the education MoonSwatch: everyone knows building a LEGO set is not the same as solving real engineering problems after earning an MIT degree. But the underlying accomplishment, a cool LEGO model, is completely real.

The watch industry figured out the honest version of this in 2022 and is running it back this Saturday. The education industry has been trying since 2012 but hasn’t managed to solve the credential credibility problem.

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