Christoph Grainger-Herr is the chief executive of IWC Schaffhausen. As a child in the 1980s he went with his father to a watch boutique in Bern, near the family's holiday home in Switzerland, an experience he has described as the start of his attachment to watchmaking. He took a degree in interior design, had career stints in architecture and marketing, and was working in Zurich as an interior designer of high-end offices, golf clubs and restaurants when IWC approached him.
In November 2016 Richemont named him to succeed Georges Kern, who had led IWC for fifteen years and moved to the group as head of watchmaking, marketing and digital; the handover was effective on 1 April 2017, and Kern passed him the microphone on stage at the IWC gala at the SIHH fair in Geneva that January.
As chief executive he oversaw the opening in 2018 of IWC's Manufakturzentrum in Schaffhausen, a building he helped design for visitors who want to see Swiss watchmaking at work. He has strengthened IWC's complications department, whose Portugieser Eternal Calendar, able to account for leap-year exceptions for some 45 million years, set a Guinness World Record and won the Aiguille d'Or at the 2024 Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève. In 2023 IWC relaunched the Ingenieur after Gérald Genta's 1970s design, of which only 598 were made at the time. He has widened the brand's appeal with smaller, more refined watches, a more feminine offer and coloured ceramic cases, launched an IWC racing team at the 2018 Goodwood Members' Meeting, and continued the partnership with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team; Lewis Hamilton was IWC's ambassador for a decade, and IWC featured prominently in the 2025 film F1.
Sources disagree on the start of his tenure (2016 in The Rake, 2017 in the Schaffhauser Nachrichten; Casadi uses the 1 April 2017 handover). Casadi has not verified his date of birth, nationality or his earlier roles at IWC.