In Milan, police waded into crowds outside a Swatch store. In Paris, tear gas was fired. In Birmingham, a dispersal order was put in place. In London, dogs were deployed. In Manhattan, two people were arrested outside a Vans store when a crowd surged at opening time: one man fell in the rush and was handcuffed rather than helped up. A Burberry x Supreme drop at Dover Street Market ended in a brawl that shut the event down entirely.
This isn't just high spirits; people are getting seriously hurt over product launches. And it keeps happening. So are the big brands learning lessons? Are they heck. The latest flashpoint came just this week, when the the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop collection dropped on 16 May.
In case you're not up on your watches, Audemars Piguet makes some of the most coveted luxury timepieces on the planet, with prices starting around £30K. Swatch is the colourful, affordable Swiss brand you might have owned as a teenager. The Royal Pop brought the two together: eight pocket watch designs with AP's high-end aesthetic at a relatively accessible £335. Genius, right?
This all should have been a good news story. Yet in the event Swatch had to close stores across the UK and Europe, overwhelmed by crowds that had been carefully primed for weeks via social media. And the brand's response ("We remind you that the Royal Pop Collection is not a limited edition") had the quality of someone lighting a bonfire and expressing surprise at the heat.
It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Chinese toy company Pop Mart paused all UK sales of its Labubu dolls in 2025 after fights broke out in its Stratford store. One customer told the BBC she witnessed a fight between a worker and a customer, and left feeling scared. A Palace x Nike Air Max 95 drop in Manhattan was cancelled altogether this April after the NYPD shut down a queue that had turned violent. Anyone seeing a pattern yet?
So what connects a pocket watch, a furry toy, a pair of trainers and a Burberry hoodie? Not price. Not even quality. What connects them is a launch strategy built around scarcity.
The strategy goes like this. Release fewer items than demand requires. Create a sense of FOMO and urgency. Let the frenzy do the marketing.
Taking responsibility
Clearly, it's working. Pop Mart's 2025 revenue rose 185% off the back of the Labubu craze, store chaos and all. Swatch's marketing team, as one academic told Reuters, did "absolute gold" work. The disorder isn't a bug in the system; it feels more like a feature.
Most people who work in design got into it because they believed it could make the world a better place. That impulse is real, and it shows in the products themselves. The Royal Pop is genuinely clever, the Labubus genuinely charming. But the same understanding of human desire that makes great design possible can also be pointed at a crowd and used to manufacture chaos and violence.
When brands engineer launches that anyone can predict will overwhelm their stores, the violence that follows isn't bad luck; it's a by-product of the strategy. The queues, the scarcity, the social media heat: these are deliberate. "We know from behavioural science that it is difficult to walk away from a queue," one LSE professor told Reuters. Brands know this too.
The standard response ("more stock is coming", "we're working on a fairer system", "we asked people not to rush") keeps the brand at arm's length from the consequences. But let's not kid ourselves. When a man gets handcuffed on a Manhattan pavement because he tripped in a rush the store created, that distance begins to feel dishonest.
These days, visit any creative agency's About page or sit in on a design conference panel, and you'll find designers talking seriously about ethics: sustainability, inclusion, accessibility, supply chains. All to the good. But maybe the question of what happens when your brand launch puts people in hospital deserves a place in that conversation too.
Read how collabs can be done well according to an expert.
