The Bits, the Bobs: AP and My Best Friend

There are a few things in life I’ve already accepted nearing my mid-30s: there will never be a good live action X-men movie, three beers deep and I’m now looking at a hangover that lasts for days, and that I’ll never own an AP.

Granted, that will never stop me from talking about the brand as if I could. Because I may have the salary of the middle class but the opinions of a billionaire (sans the whole gold flecks in food).

The latest marvel x AP collaboration has us looking at two different skeleton-adjacent Spider-man dials: the classic red and blue and the iconic black suit spiderman. 

While I was checking out the images of this watch, my wife looked over at me and commented that I was doing my “skeptical muppet face” with a bit of my mother’s non-verbal “I don’t know about all that” noise. 

Spider-man is my favorite superhero of all time but I was initially just…caught off guard, I guess, by this execution. Remembering my own golden rule of “if they made it, there's a market, and if there's a market, that means someone out there wants it because there's a watch out there for everyone.” So I brushed past my misgivings and got to thinking: who is this timepiece for?

It wasn’t a process of dismissal, just a general one because the cost of it alone put some (most) of us out of the running* (*a house). Then I looked to the purpose. 

Yes, it was a collaboration with two giants in their respective fields. Yes, it was an eyebrow raising amount of money for people who eat the occasional ramen packet or two. 

But then I read that all the money for these limited pieces goes to charity. “That's something I can get behind,” I said to myself, readjusting my monocle. Even if it's not for us, the general collective watch community, it's still for hardcore enthusiasts and collectors at a different stage. And beyond that, it's not for us. Yes, the glory in ownership of such a rare timepiece is nice. 

The people who benefit directly from the sale of that watch? Yeah. There we go.

Maybe it's an easy call to make on my side (who says “absolutely not” to charity?) and maybe it's good PR for both Disney and AP. But the kid who grew up loving my friendly neighborhood hero knows that this is something right up the entire Spidey pantheon’s alley.

My opinion doesn’t really impact their market strategy for the foreseeable future (which, shame) but if it did, I’d tell them to make as many of these pieces as they could.