58 AFAR SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
connect workshop
located on Schaffhausen’s outskirts and
opened last year to coincide with the watch-
maker’s 150th anniversary.
Most Swiss watch brands secure their
workshops like nuclear weapons labs. At the
new facility, IWC is intent on doing the oppo-
site. “We’re looking forward to welcoming
10,000 guests a year and giving them the in-
depth experience of how our watches are
made,” says CEO Christoph Grainger-Herr,
a former architect who helped
design the new building. It takes
only 10 minutes to drive to the
new factory from the city center,
but when you see its soaring mod-
ernist frame, which rises from
the countryside like a gleaming
luxury yacht cresting a grass-
green wave, you feel as if you’ve
leapt centuries forward in time.
here make some 1,500 parts out of brass, steel,
and copper, including bridges, oscillating
weights, levers, and springs—the tiny compo-
nents that, working in unison, create and release
enough energy to push the hands of a watch
around the dial, or face, with reassuring preci-
sion. Once assembled, these parts are known
as a movement or a caliber.
Movements will eventually be fitted onto
metal discs known as movement base plates,
which are also made in the small-parts work-
shop. But first the plates will be shuttled to the
decoration department, where engravers and
stone setters adorn the metal discs using cen-
turies-old artisanal techniques such as perlage,
a process of creating a series of fine overlap-
ping circles, or Côtes de Genève, grooves that
give the appearance of vertical stripes. Even
though these decorative elements embellish
the insides of the watch, and may be visible
only through a small crystal opening on the
back, the amount of time devoted to their fin-
ishing helps explain why IWC watches retail
from $4,600 to $220,000 (and even more for
customized timepieces).Visitors enter the two-story 145,000-
square-foot facility through a high-ceilinged
lobby composed of steel, glass, and concrete.
The contemporary vibe belies the old-fash-
ioned technology powering the company’s
watches, represented in the entrance hall by a
30-foot-high model of IWC’s groundbreaking
perpetual calendar wristwatch. The timepiece,
which requires no adjustment until the year
2499, was created in 1985 by Kurt Klaus, the
master watchmaker who, at age
84, continues to serve as a brand
spokesperson.
The next stop on the tour is
the ground-level small-parts
workshop, where computerized
machines that resemble Brob-
dingnagian kitchen appliances
carry out the bulk of IWC’s auto-
mated production. MachinesClockwise from top left:
An IWC customer; a
watch component; the
16th-century Munot
Fortress looks down
on Schaffhausen; a
worker at the new man-
ufacturing center; the
center’s lobby; a boat
nearing Rhine Falls.