IWC Schaffhausen

Florentine Ariosto Jones, an American engineer and former director at E. Howard & Co. in Boston, founded the International Watch Company in 1868 to make watches in Switzerland for the US market. Rebuffed in French-speaking Switzerland, he settled in Schaffhausen with the support of the industrialist Heinrich Moser, whose hydroelectric scheme on the Rhine powered the town's industry, and a new factory on the river was completed in 1875.

Tariffs and money problems followed, and in 1880 the shareholder Johannes Rauschenbach-Vogel took over the company. Four generations of the Rauschenbach family, later through the Homberger line, owned IWC: his son Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk until 1905, then the heirs, among them Carl Gustav Jung, with Ernst Jakob Homberger as sole proprietor from shortly before the 1929 crash, and Hans Homberger from 1955. In 1885 the firm made the Pallweber, an early digital-display pocket watch.

Key designs date from that period: the 1936 Special Pilot's Watch, the 1939 Portugieser, the 1940 Big Pilot's Watch, the Mark 11 of 1948, Albert Pellaton's automatic winding system of 1950 and the anti-magnetic Ingenieur of 1955. Gérald Genta later redesigned the Ingenieur.

The 1970s quartz and currency crisis pushed IWC towards pocket watches, Porsche Design titanium watches and outside capital. VDO Adolf Schindling took a majority in 1978, and director Günter Blümlein, appointed in 1981, restored the company's finances and commissioned Kurt Klaus to build a wrist-worn grande complication. After Mannesmann bought VDO, IWC joined Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne in the LMH group in 1991.

Richemont bought LMH in 2000. Georges Kern ran IWC from 2002 to 2017. In 2018 the company opened its Manufakturzentrum in Schaffhausen, bringing production under one roof, and it introduced the ceramic-titanium material Ceratanium.

Christoph Grainger-Herr is the current chief executive. In 2023 IWC relaunched the Ingenieur after Genta's design, and in 2024 the Portugieser Eternal Calendar won the Aiguille d'Or at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève.