The newest range of watches to be introduced at the SIHH is the Vintage Collection, designed to honour the company's 140th anniversary this year. The Vintage Collection has taken watches from IWC's rich history and subtly updated them.
“The Vintage collection will be our big focus for 2008,” George Kern, President, IWC, explains. “All the platinum versions will be limited. Instead of one complicated piece, which would be unavailable to the general public, I thought it would be better to have product open to a wider audience. We have no new products this year; we have contemporary products based on historical products. Next year, our offerings will be all about IWC’s founder, F.A. Jones, and it will be all America, with a total American feeling.”




Original historical watches (right)


The Vintage collection has six references, with a special limited edition boxed set that features all six watches in platinum.
Guy Bove, the Creative Director at IWC was responsible for the vintage project. “At the beginning, there was quite a debate about how close we should be to the original watches,” he remembers. “We finally decided to get as close as we could to the originals because the idea was to present the original watches to the public. We took the original ones and kept the designs as faithful as possible. They are bigger and we have also incorporated our current colour codes into the models - silver dials for platinum, black dials for steel.”
Though IWC has a reputation for highly engin-eered products, the exterior design is still quite important. “Supreme mastery of the mechanical time display is still no guarantee of success if the form does not meet with approval,” Kern says. “Though we refer to ourselves as 'The Engineers of Fine Watchmaking,' we are also aesthetes through and through. We build precision products with complex functionality and excellent user-friendliness, yet we remain aware of the need to house these products in an attractive case. The latest example is the new Da Vinci range in its new and exciting tonneau case.”




PORTOFINO, PORTUGUESE, INGENIEUR AUTOMATIC



AQUATIMER, PILOT WATCH, DA VINCI AUTOMATIC


Rework done
IWC has now finished a complete update of all its product families. “We have successfully revised our entire product range over the last five years, and we have created differentiated watch families with a high recognition value and clear positioning,” Kern sums up. “We have integrated our marketing into the Richemont structure and built up a global sales network. The brand is internationally oriented and is represented all over the world. The Schaffhausen site has new pro-duction buildings – of which the latest will be officially opened in early summer of this year – and these will enable us to increase our capacity to satisfy growing demand. Thanks to measures already implemented a number of years ago, IWC is today acknowledged as a certified CO2-neutral company.”


Source: Europa Star April-May 2008 Magazine Issue