IWC: Chronicle of a Sleeping Giant

IWC, founded by American Florentino Ariosto Jones in the 19th century, was known for innovations such as the Pallweber digital system and iconic watches like the Big Pilot and the Portugieser. In recent years, the brand has focused its strategy on marketing, losing some of its original boldness and exclusivity.

Few people know or remember that the International Watch Company, aka IWC, was founded by an American, an enterprising gringo who left his country in the middle of the last century with the plan of manufacturing pocket watches in Switzerland to export and sell in the then-booming American economy. The tinkerer Florentino Ariosto Jones knew exactly what he was doing, quickly grasped the business, and in 1875 moved the factory to the banks of the Rhine River on the German border to harness the river's current to generate power for his fledgling pocket watch manufacturing plant. We can see that from the very beginning, the brand was born from an innovative spirit.

Their beginnings in pocket watchmaking were marked by the invention of the first digital time display system, the Pallweber, which was cutting-edge technology at the time. Their true notoriety came during the war, when they began developing their first pocket watches for pilots. That Pilot featured a rotating bezel and the design cues that would come to define an entire category in the decades to come. It was the inspiration for what we know today as the Big Pilot, an iconic watch created in 1940 to meet the military requirements of the Nazi German Air Force.

During that same era of innovation, the brand came to the aid of two Portuguese distributors looking for extremely high-precision watches to use as maritime navigation instruments. The brand's response was to take a highly precise but enormous caliber from their pocket watches and install it in a custom wristwatch case, thus creating what they named the Portuguese, now known as the Portugieser.

With the postwar focus firmly on conquering the world, many brands began manufacturing civilian versions of their military instruments. Panerai's diving watches are well-known, and IWC's pilot's watch, launched in 1948: the Pilot Mark 11, was a landmark. This watch, now a legend, would forever mark the brand's history and would also be the precursor to other professional models designed for recreational use, such as the Aquatimer, launched in 1967 to meet the needs of the nascent civilian submarine industry. With this, the brand was already building an enviable catalog of navigation, aviation, and diving watches, but everything seems to fall apart when one least expects it.

Seiko, a Japanese company, put the first quartz movement up for sale, and the Swiss watch industry was on the verge of collapse. IWC joined a conglomerate of Swiss brands to quickly develop a quartz caliber that could compete with the Japanese, resulting in the launch of the Beta 21, a pioneering movement in the Swiss industry that was used in countless models by different brands, with the Da Vinci being the recipient of this movement in IWC's case.

Having overcome this crisis, the brand returned fully to the path of innovation and technical prowess, inviting a young Gerald Genta to redesign its engineer's watch, the Ingenieur, and enjoying all the magic of genius with a creation that to this day is revered, imitated, and sure to be soon relaunched. Thus came the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the golden decades, in my opinion, for the brand, with the creation of such innovative projects as the first titanium chronograph, the Ocean 2000 in collaboration with Porsche, and some of the most groundbreaking, disruptive, and bordering on misogyny marketing campaigns we could remember. A golden age that culminated with the launch of the Big Pilot in 2002, a watch that takes the tradition of those World War II pilot watches and brings it into a 21st century that was hungry for large watches and vintage designs. John Mayer, the hip-hop singer, made this watch famous by choosing it as his favorite, and since then the brand hasn't looked back, releasing version after version until it has become a family in itself.

Perhaps success was the brand's problem, which with the arrival of George Kern as president abandoned the path of hard innovation and focused more on the alchemy of marketing, introducing brand ambassadors, glamorous photoshoots with influencers, and even the first women's collection, something that for many years was not only unthinkable but was directly mocked by the brand in its press ads.

Since then, IWC has been suffering with the ups and downs of the industry, gradually abandoning its alpha male position in the pack to transform into something more mainstream: a brand that retains those incredible designs, but has lost a certain audacity in its creations and a certain dynamism that we came to expect from them after the unforgettable perpetual calendars of Kurt Klaus, the fascinating double chronos of Félix Habring, and the complex mechanical depth gauges that were world pioneers in their diving watches. We understand that being part of a conglomerate like Richemont means being accountable to shareholders, conquering markets like Asia, and hitting sales numbers no matter what. But as collectors, we long for the days when holding one of these watches in your hand was a breathtaking experience.

The precision of their parts, the minimal tolerances, and the austerity and Teutonic functionality of their design made them a special product. Not a product for everyone. In fact, it was a product for a select few. Expensive, unnecessarily complicated, sometimes huge and difficult to use, but overdeveloped watches as only the Germans know how. We continue to love IWC and we will continue to love IWC because we also know that in the world of pre-owned watches, there are hundreds of gems from this brand waiting to be discovered from its glorious decades at spectacular prices, which could be the crown jewel of your collection or simply the best everyday watch you'll ever own.