IWC Watch International Blog

The red carpet is rolled out for our #FriendsoftheBrand....

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:44:19 +0200

The red carpet is rolled out for our #FriendsoftheBrand. #IWCCannes2013

Getting ready for tonight. Last preparations for #IWC’s...

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:50:21 +0200

Getting ready for tonight. Last preparations for #IWC’s #FortheLoveofCinema event. #IWCCannes2013

Tomorrow, we will host our #FortheLoveofCinema event. Looking...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:37:57 +0200

Tomorrow, we will host our #FortheLoveofCinema event. Looking forward to welcoming our #FriendsoftheBrand #IWCCannes2013

A Closer Look At The New Portuguese Chronograph Classic

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:17:00 +0200

Not too long ago IWC announced the new Portuguese Chronograph Classic, an in-house flyback chronograph to augment the reference 3741 chronograph that so many people love. Although this year is the year of the Ingenieur family, the Portuguese Chronograph Classic is definitely worth a closer look.

The biggest development in the Portuguese Chronograph Classic is the use of the in-house caliber 89361, which has a number of awesome features. First off is the flyback mechanism, which, combined with the hacking sub-seconds register at 6 o’clock, speaks to the navigational history of the Portuguese family.

Looking at the dial you’re probably wondering where all the sub-registers are for the chronograph, and the answer is that both minutes and hours (up to 12) are nested at 12 o’clock. The caliber 89361 displays elapsed time this way to make reading the chronograph time just as intuitive as reading out the time of day. No fussing with multiple subdials here.

The 89361 is automatically winding and has a 68-hour power reserve, plus there is a date window at 3 o’clock on the Portuguese Chronograph Classic for good measure. You can see this amazing in-house movement through the expansive sapphire caseback.

The Portuguese Chronograph Classic comes in a variety of configurations. You choose from either an 18k red gold or stainless steel case and a silver-plated or slate-colored dial, offering four very different looks.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

Watch International issue 2/2013 goes to print. Stay tuned for...

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:54:22 +0200

Watch International issue 2/2013 goes to print. Stay tuned for more exciting stories. Subscribe now https://iwc-watch.smartpublishing.ch/home-en.html

Go For (Triple) Gold At IWC's Boutiques

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:56:57 +0200

We’ve told you about the IWC Flagship Boutique New York City, and today we have a few special watches that you can only find at a handful of global boutiques (New York included). Here we have the Boutique Exclusive Edition collection, which includes a Portuguese Hand-Wound, a Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar and an Ingenieur Automatic, all rendered in beautiful red gold.

Not only have red and rose gold been experiencing a massive surge in popularity, but we have also noticed more and more nuanced shades of gold popping up in watches. Everything from the barely pink to the deep rich red. The later is what you’ll find in all three Boutique Exclusive Edition watches.

The first two watches in the collection are both time-only, but they couldn’t be more different. The 44mm Portuguese Hand-Wound houses IWC’s 98295 caliber, reminiscent of the pocket watch movements used in the original Portuguese watches of the 1930s. The simple white dial is complemented nicely by the red gold hands and arabic numerals that match the case. Only one thousand pieces will be available worldwide.

The slightly smaller 42.5mm Ingenieur Automatic is the second watch in the collection, and it features a rich brown dial with red gold accents to compliment the red gold case. This is one you’ve really got to see in person to appreciate fully, as the subtle contrasts shift with the light. Slightly more limited than the Portuguese above, the Ingenieur Automatic Boutique Exclusive Edition will only be made in an edition of five hundred pieces.

Finally, the highlight is the Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar. Coming in at 46.2mm, the red gold case houses the caliber 51614 automatic perpetual calendar movement with a 7-day power reserve (helpful for keeping your perpetual wound). The red gold-plated dial is an absolute stunner aesthetically and the crown-setting mechanism for the perpetual calendar is just as impressive technically. Still more limited than the previous two models, only 250 pieces of this special edition will be made.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

The IWC Ingenieur collection has arrived in Hong Kong

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:57:44 +0200

The IWC Ingenieur collection has arrived in Hong Kong

IWC's One Year Anniversary In New York City

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:58:57 +0200

It’s tough to believe, but it was only a year ago that IWC’s flagship boutique opened its doors on New York City’s Madison Avenue. In a short period of time the IWC boutique has become an anchor of the New York watch community.

Over the last year the Madison Avenue flagship has played host to a number of diverse events. These include collectors events drawing dedicated IWC collectors together for evenings of product previews as well as cocktail parties co-hosted with the likes of GQ and Esquire, drawing stylish men from around the New York area.

Of course there was also the recent launch of the special Portuguese watches developed for the Tribeca Film Festival, including the Portuguese Automatic Edition Tribeca Film Festival 2013 and the Portuguese Tribute To The Tribeca Film Institute piece-unique. The red carpet was rolled out, drinks were poured, and these two special watches were the stars of the show.

Even on a typical day, IWC on Madison Avenue is more than your run of the mill boutique. It is a beautiful setting where you can relax and read a book (there is a great selection on hand), take a look at Howard Bingham’s iconic Muhammad Ali photographs, or, if you’re so inclined, check out different watch families in different corners of the boutique.

The photos here are a selection from our sneak peak photo report delivered a year ago just before the boutique opened to the public. Be sure to check out the full report here.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

IWC collectors’ table shot

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:38:22 +0200

IWC collectors’ table shot

Spring, it was about time…#IWC (at IWC Headquarters)

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:25:13 +0200

Spring, it was about time…#IWC (at IWC Headquarters)

The Beijing International Film Festival And IWC

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:04:17 +0200

Last week we told you about IWC Schaffhausen’s new partnership with the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. While the festival is still ongoing, with great success we might add, it’s not the only festival where you’ll find IWC playing a part.

The third Beijing International Film Festival begins this week, with IWC as a prominent sponsor. Continuing it’s long-standing connection with the world of film-making, IWC hosted the Live of Cinema gala in Beijing for 200 VIP guests who came from all over the world to walk down the red carpet.

Over the course of the evening, IWC presented the IWC Filmmaker Award, an award given out at many prominent film festivals, including Cannes, Tribeca, and Dubai. It is intended to celebration an outstanding achievement from an exceptional personality. This year in Beijing, it was presented to Woo Yu-Sen on a city wall dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Along with the award, Yu-Sen receive a new IWC Portuguese Chronograph Classic with a special “For the Love of Cinema” engraving.

While the Tribeca Film Festival has become a massive success in just over a decade, and the hope is that Beijing’s festival will quickly do the same. The festival, as you might have guessed from the name, the Beijing International Film Festival seeks to becomes a crossroads where filmmakers worldwide can come together to exchange ideas, techniques, and cultural practices.

“This festival brings together national and international representatives from the film industry and offers them a professional and innovative exchange platform,” says IWC Schaffhausen CEO George Kern. “Our role as sponsor enables us to underline both our passion for the world of film-making and the significance of the Chinese market for our brand. We are delighted to be here in the capital.”

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

IWC At The Tribeca Film Festival

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:09:04 +0200

This year IWC kicks off a partnership with New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. Two very special watches are highlights of the partnership, and here we’ll take a closer look.

Involvement with film is nothing new for IWC, but to celebrate the new partnership, the brand created a piece unique Portuguese Automatic that was auctioned at Antiquorum New York on April 10th. The platinum Portuguese Automatic has a slate grey dial inspired by New York, bordeaux subdials to recall the red carpet, and beautiful rose gold hands and numerals, not to mention the customized rotor. It sold for $60,000, more than twice the high estimate, and all of the proceeds benefit the Tribeca Film Institute.

Obviously, only one lucky watch lover can have this Portuguese, but for a slightly larger audience, IWC also released the Portuguese Automatic Edition Tribeca Film Festival 2013. Limited to 100 pieces, these watches retain a lot of the visual cues of the piece unique above, though steel steps in for platinum in the case, steel markers and hands replace the rose gold ones, and the rotor is decorated accordingly. These are available exclusively through IWC boutiques in the USA and you can find more here.

The festival runs from April 17-28th and you can find more information here. Also, be sure to check out HODINKEE’s inside look at the limited edition and piece unique Portuguese watches with President IWC North America, Gianfranco D’Attis.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

The Newest IWC Boutique Opens In The Eternal City

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:15:00 +0200

Last year we excitedly covered the opening of the new IWC boutique on New York’s Madison Avenue. It was an exciting occasion for any New York watch lover, and now those living in Rome have cause for celebration as well - IWC has just opened its latest boutique in the famous Piazza di Spagna.

This marks IWC’s first boutique opening in Italy, and it would be difficult to choose a more amazing location than the Piazza di Spagna. Home to the “Spanish Steps” (nope, not in Spain), it’s on any tourist’s must-see list of sites, but is also at the heart of the city and is far from a tourist trap.

The centuries-old stone of the city gives way to chrome, leather, and dark wood inside the 40-square-meter boutique through massive windows. The warm light floods in from the Piazza, giving the whole boutique a uniquely Roman feel. Anyone who has ever been to Rome will know exactly what we mean by this.

It’s an exciting step for IWC and something Italian watch fanatics have been anxiously awaiting for some time now. The only question we have now is “where next?”

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

Which one would you take on your Easter break? (at IWC...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:43:07 +0100

Which one would you take on your Easter break? (at IWC Headquarters)

Changing Time

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:57:08 +0100

It’s that time of year - everyone is adjusting their clocks and watches to reflect summer time as the days get longer and longer. On March 30th, Schaffhausen will turn its clocks forward one hour, so we thought it appropriate this week to discuss a watch that is all about adjusting the time on the fly - the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer.

The Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer starts with the same foundation as IWC’s other Pilot watches - there is the matte black dial with extremely legible white numbers and markers, broad, easy to see hands, and the altimeter-inspired triple date window. It even retains the anti-magnetic soft-iron inner case and hacking seconds functions. But, added to all this are 24-hour and cities rings around the perimeter of the main dial, offering a whole new realm of functionality.

Reading the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer is very straightforward. The main dial tells you your local time, and your current timezone is indicated by the arrow at 12 o’clock pointing to the corresponding timezone on the cities ring. Adjusting your local time, forwards or backwards, can be done simply with the crown, which can either fully set the time to the second or jump full hours one at a time. Then, to read the time in any of the 24 timezones on the ring, you simply read the hour on the 24-hour dial that sits next to the timezone in which you want to know local time. Easy enough, right?

Drawing on the real military heritage of the IWC Pilot’s watch, the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer also includes UTC (Universal Tim Coordinated), a military standard time allowing coordination of forces all over the world. It might not be something you’ll use on a daily basis, but it’s a nice nod to the history of the IWC Pilot.

So whether you’re moving across timezones, or just adjust the time in your own, it doesn’t get much easier than with the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

#IWC is known for its engineering and craftsmanship (at IWC...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:41:33 +0100

#IWC is known for its engineering and craftsmanship (at IWC Headquarters)

It's Finally (Balance) Spring Time

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:24:37 +0100

Well, it’s officially the first day of spring - though depending on where you live, it might not feel like it quite yet. To celebrate, we thought we would take a look at one of the most important parts of any watch, the balance spring.

Though it is tough to imagine, balance springs are a relatively recent invention in the history of timekeeping. The first balance spring was invented in 1675, finally creating a reliable alternative to the pendulum as a regulating organ. But it wasn’t until Abraham-Louis Breguet arrived in the eighteenth century that we a more precise form of balance spring that is still used in top-tier watchmaking today.

IWC employs Breguet springs in its in-house calibers 51000 and 59000 (found in watches such as the Portuguese Automatic and Portofino Hand-Wound Eight Days), which is no simple feat. Getting the spring shaped just-so, conforming to a special Phillips curve, requires skilled watchmakers to manually pull and twist the spring under a microscope. Tolerances can be as little as hundredths of millimeters, and the process is both expensive and laborious.

But what about the balance spring allowed the modern watch to develop as it has? To begin with, it provides a compact solution to a problem that previously required more massive responses - you can’t exactly carry a pendulum around all day, let alone keep it moving at a constant rate. And this brings us to the second innovation, consistency. Breguet’s coil allowed for an extremely accurate beat-rate to be set with the balance wheel, and advances in material sciences have allowed us over the last few decades to produce springs more consistent over time than ever before.

The most significant weakness of the balance spring is its susceptibility to gravity, and thus the tourbillon was born. In a pocket watch, which sat in one vertical position all day, the balance spring would be pulled down by gravity, negatively impacting accuracy. By constantly rotating the balance in a cage, this effect is distributed evenly on all parts of the spring, eliminating the inconsistencies. In wristwatches this is much less of a problem, though watching the balance spring beat away inside an elegantly spinning tourbillon is still a beautiful sight.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

There is always a rainbow after the rain. (at IWC Headquarters)

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:34:09 +0100

There is always a rainbow after the rain. (at IWC Headquarters)

The Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph "Laureus Sport For Good Foundation" - A Watch With A Mission To Change Lives

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:29:31 +0100

This week saw the 2013 Laureus World Sports Awards, the latest event held for the Laureus Foundation, one of the world’s leaders in harnessing the power of sport for social good. And, for the seventh year in a row, IWC has produced a limited edition watch to celebrate the Laureus Sport For Good Foundation, with some of the proceeds directly benefiting Laureaus’s amazing work.

The aptly named Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph Edition “Laureus Sport For Good Foundation” starts with many of the same features as the other Portuguese Yacht Club Chronographs. You have the 45.4mm stainless steel case, the in-house caliber 89361 movement (which is automatic and features a flyback chronograph complication), and the fantastically comfortable rubber strap.

But, as with the previous Laureus watches, this Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph features a stunning blue dial that reflects lights so nicely it almost glows. There is also the special steel case back, with an engraving modeled on a drawing by a twelve-year-old Sri Lankan boy who has participated in Laureus programs. The drawing won a contest hosted by IWC, asking children at Laureus events to interpret the phrase “time to move” in their own way. A sprinter is cheered on by his fans as the Olympic flame blazes overhead. It’s a charming reminder of the real power this watch holds.

IWC CEO Georges Kern put it nicely, saying “The privileged people on this planet – and we are among them – must do something to help those who are socially, physically or economically dis- advantaged.” Laureus includes a collection of foundations, including the Laureus Sport For Good Foundation, as well as smaller foundations all over the world doing work in their respective communities. While producing a limited edition watch is certainly a fitting tribute, IWC’s commitment also extends to its employees participating in their local foundation chapters from Switzerland to Asia to the United States.

Only 1000 Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph “Laureus Sport For Good Foundation” watches will be produced, and you can find out more about the watch here. Also, please visit Laureus Sport For Good to find out how you can get involved along with IWC.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

Just like us… winter seems to have a strong connection...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:15:56 +0100

Just like us… winter seems to have a strong connection with Schaffhausen (hier: IWC Headquarters)