Powered by the Rhine: A Visit to the IWC Manufacture

Prestige visits the IWC headquarters, manufacture and museum to gain a deeper understanding of the Schaffhausen-based watchmaker.

There are definite advantages when the CEO of your watchmaking company is also an architect. Christian Knoop, who joined IWC Schaffhausen in 2008, and COO Andreas Voll, who’d arrived at the company a year before, both harboured a dream to build a modern facility for the brand that would not only optimise its production capabilities and provide superb working conditions for its employees, but also stand as a monument to the corporate spirit and give visitors from around the world a true understanding of the brand. That dream was eventually realised on the brand’s 150th anniversary in 2018. With a design overseen by Knoop, the Manufakturzentrum is a 145,000-square-foot production facility on the outskirts of the northern Swiss city of Schaffhausen, which brings together the production of movement components, movements and cases under a single roof. 

Standing proudly on the banks of the River Rhine, IWC’s original factory now serves as the brand’s headquarters and museum; it’s also where testing, final assembling and servicing is done. This is where we begin our visit ahead of this year’s Watches & Wonders show in Geneva.

We start with a beautifully re-told history lesson in the form of a short film that recounts the journey of IWC Schaffhausen’s American founder, who’s played by Hollywood actor James Marsden. We learn why Florentine Ariosto Jones, an engineer and a watchmaker from Boston, decided to settle in Schaffhausen to industrialise watchmaking and establish an “international watch company”. Importantly, to him, the facility should be situated close to the railway and also beside a river in order to harness water to power the factory’s machines. Schaffhausen was the perfect location, as it stands at the junction of the Swiss and German railway networks, and the nearby Rhine Falls are the most powerful in Europe. 

As we move through the museum, we hear about other important figures in the story of IWC history. There are the Rauschenbachs, a family of industrialists who took over the company after Jones’s return to the United States in 1868, and oversaw the innovation of a pocket watch with a digital hours and minutes display known as the Pallweber system, which is now one of IWC’s distinctive design codes. And there’s the era of Ernst Jakob Homberger (1905-1940), when the unmistakeable designs of the Spezialuhr für Flieger Pilot’s Watches and the Portugieser model, the latter with large dial sizes and high-precision calibres, first appeared. 

It was also during Homberger’s time that the Ingenieur first appeared, a watch that made a triumphant return last year to the IWC line-up in a much-lauded sports collection. The company’s last private owner, Homberger is also credited for the launch of the Aquatimer and the Beta 21 quartz movement. We learn about the adaptations made by the house during the quartz era, when Günter Blümlein made such pivotal decisions as producing dashboard instruments for cars, as well as focusing on the development of special materials for watches. The mid-1980s was also when the young Kurt Klaus debuted the first perpetual calendar in the Da Vinci family, followed by the launch of a first Grande Complication seven years later, which propelled the house to haute horlogerie status. 

Although IWC has been part of the Richemont group since 2000, as we walk through the museum examining the historic pieces on display it’s easy to see from its current portfolio of collections how each leader shaped the brand and added to its legacy. Following the tour, we’re chaperoned off to see the testing facilities, where we’re told 12 technicians, who are expected to know all 220 references and be aware of any potential issues, “test and torture the watches”. All prototypes are evaluated here, as well as batches for all new models, for which cases, forms, materials and functions go through a range of tests devised specifically in-house – sometimes even using parts that aren’t available on the market. A technician gleefully shows us Lego parts that they’ve included in one of the machines, as they mimic body movement better than anything else they could find.  

And then we’re off to the Manufakzentrum. Entering through imposing 9-metre-high lobby doors, we’re drawn to the proud portraits adorning the wall of all the leaders and designers who’ve played important roles in the company’s – familiar faces that include Blümlein, Klaus and, more recently, the former CEO Georges Kern. Guests are permitted to walk through large portions of the production area, which are all bathed in natural light, and witness up close how the movements and cases are put together.

Around 1,500 components are produced here, including parts for the automatic movements of the calibre families 52 and 82, the hand-wound movements of calibre family 59, and the chronograph movements of calibre family 69. There are a great many machines that produce complex parts such as ebauche bridges, rotors and plates, as well as those that make parts so small they’re barely visible to the naked eye. Afterwards, we move on to see how the components are finished at the electroplating shop, where a layer of nickel and rhodium protect them from tarnishing, and see machines that help add decorations such as Côtes de Genève. The parts then move on to assembly, a delicate process that’s still done by hand, even though large parts of production are now automated. We spy some new components that excite us; days later at the fair, they’re revealed to be the tiny ball-shaped indicator within the hand-wound IWC Portugieser Tourbillon Day and Night. 

With about 300 watchmakers in total, IWC is proudly 80 percent vertically integrated and increasing, as the facility has a capacity for up to 400 people. We watch them at work, viewing their precise assembly through their cyber loupes, which project their efforts on the big screen. The Manufakzentrum combines industrial automation with the human touch – elements that make IWC what it is today, a brand that’s been engineering time since 1868. 

This article was first published in Prestige Hong Kong