IWC chief wants watch brand to boldly go where it has not gone before

SINGAPORE – There is a moment when IWC’s Christoph Grainger-Herr talks about winning watchmaking’s biggest prize and the polished chief executive briefly disappears.

In his place is a bundle of nerves sitting in Geneva’s Theatre du Leman, convinced things are going badly.

It was November 2024 and IWC Schaffhausen’s Portugieser Eternal Calendar was in contention at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Geneve, the watch industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.

As category after category went to other brands, Grainger-Herr kept texting his team. Then Laurent Ferrier won the Calendar and Astronomy Watch Prize, a category in which IWC was also nominated.

“I was destroyed because I thought this was our prize,” he recalls.

Then people around him began giving him funny looks. It slowly dawned on him that IWC might instead be getting the night’s biggest award, the Aiguille d’Or. His nerves promptly went haywire.

“I couldn’t move my jaw any more. I was dizzy. I felt sick,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, if they call my name now to come onstage, I’m going to fall flat on my face’.”

They did. He did not.

The Eternal Calendar won the Aiguille d’Or, the watch industry’s top prize, affirming the Swiss brand’s renewed focus on high watchmaking. The sophisticated timepiece automatically adjusts for the Gregorian calendar’s quirks, including the three leap years skipped every 400 years. Its moon-phase display is even more remarkable: It will deviate by just one day in more than 45 million years.

For Grainger-Herr, however, the prize meant more than bragging rights. “When you try and explain to your colleagues that it’s the right thing to do and we should invest in this watchmaking and build it up, and then it comes together... it’s amazing,” he says during a recent visit to Singapore.

It is an unguarded admission from the man who has run IWC since 2017 and an interesting glimpse into how his mind works.

Born in Frankfurt in 1978, Grainger-Herr became fascinated by mechanical watches as a child. He recalls accompanying his father in the 1980s to buy a Patek Philippe in Bern.

But watches were not initially his career.

He studied interior design at Bournemouth University in Britain and worked as an architect in Zurich. His route into IWC came through architecture: He became involved in the design of the watchmaker’s museum in Schaffhausen and joined the company in 2006.

Over the next decade, he moved through trade marketing, strategic planning, retail and international sales before being appointed chief executive in 2017, aged 39.

Playing referee

Architecture, it turns out, was not bad training for running a watch company.

“Architects have to think in complex systems that are very technical,” he says. Yet all those calculations, engineering requirements and hidden infrastructure ultimately have to produce something much less rational: an emotion.

A watch, he says, works much the same way. “It’s a very complex system that ultimately you want to put on your wrist and go, ‘Love it’.”

There is, however, one big difference. Buildings can now be computer-rendered with extraordinary accuracy before construction starts. Watches cannot.

A tiny change to a dial, case or finish alters the way light plays across everything around it. Colours that look wrong separately can become unexpectedly harmonious together. So prototypes have to be made, handled, stared at and frequently rejected.

Sometimes, IWC makes 20 variations to see how cases, dials, colours and materials interact. What looks convincing on a computer screen may fall flat in metal; combinations that look dubious in a rendering can suddenly sing on the wrist.

Such tinkering also explains why Grainger-Herr describes his role at IWC as that of a “referee”.

On one side are production teams who would dearly love to manufacture one thing with 10 years of certainty. On the other are marketing, creative and sales teams who, armed with whatever they learnt yesterday, would happily change everything tomorrow.

“And I’m sort of the referee in the middle,” he says, “to take the abuse from both sides.”

That tension – between continuity and change – runs through IWC.

Founded in Schaffhausen in 1868 by American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones, the manufacture is marking 90 years of its Pilot’s Watches in 2026. Its identity has long been steeped in engineering, aviation and functional design.

But Grainger-Herr has little interest in turning all that history into a museum.

“I’m not interested in just replicating what has been,” he says.

Re-editions, he adds, have their place, but “it’s also about inventing things, innovating and bringing things forward”.

Take 2026’s Pilot’s Venturer Vertical Drive. Developed over 4½ years, it is IWC’s first mechanical tool watch designed from scratch for human spaceflight, rather than an aviation watch modified for astronauts.

There is no conventional crown. Instead, astronauts select functions with a rocker switch and operate them by turning the bezel, making the watch easier to use while wearing gloves. The pared-back black dial reduces glare and keeps information to a minimum, allowing the watch’s users to read it quickly and clearly.

The watch has been tested with commercial space station company Vast and certified for flight aboard Haven-1, its planned commercial space station.

The project emerged, Grainger-Herr says, from IWC’s relationships with pilots and astronauts, and a realisation that the new commercial space age needed its own design language.

SpaceX and newer space companies have moved away from the visual vocabulary of the Apollo era towards something sleeker, minimalist and more human-centred.

So why keep sending vintage-looking aviation watches into the future?

“I really felt like we should design something from the ground up that is specific for space,” he says.

The development process involved plenty of dead ends and roughly assembled prototypes.

Grainger-Herr loved it.

Working with space companies exposed him to a culture of “how can we get it done by next Friday?” rather than waiting until everything was perfect.

“By trying and sometimes also failing, you are making progress,” he says. “It has to be wrong in the middle.”

The F1 connection

For all his talk about rockets and engineering, however, Grainger-Herr knows IWC faces another challenge: broadening a brand historically drenched in testosterone. Its worlds – aviation, racing, navigation and engineering – have traditionally skewed male.

Changing that, he says, cannot mean suddenly turning “a sort of Germanic muscular engineering brand” into something “Frenchy feminine”.

Instead, IWC is gradually changing sizes, models, ambassadors, boutiques and storytelling. Pilot’s and Ingenieur models now include smaller sizes, while precious metals, two-tone executions and diamonds are widening the vocabulary. The objective is not to abandon engineering but to make the brand more inviting to both men and women.

“It’s a long-term project,” he says.

Then there is Formula One, perhaps IWC’s most visible playground.

The company has been the official engineering partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team since 2013, and Grainger-Herr clearly relishes the intersection of machines, design and popular culture.

Its involvement in the 2025 Brad Pitt film F1 became an unusually elaborate exercise in brand integration, with fictional team APXGP carrying IWC branding on cars, uniforms, garages and even helmets.

At one point, Grainger-Herr received an e-mail from somebody identified only as “BP”.

He ignored it.

A few days later, his team asked: “Did Brad Pitt e-mail you about watches?”

Pitt had. He wanted a specific watch – a custom vintage Ingenieur from the 1970s – for his character, Sonny Hayes, who wears it as an heirloom from his father.

Grainger-Herr says IWC did not engineer the emotional role the watch eventually played in the film. He discovered some of the scenes only when he watched the finished movie in a cinema.

“Oh God,” he remembers thinking. “They’re all going to blame this on me.”

Formula One now brings him back to Singapore.

For the Singapore Grand Prix in October, IWC is unveiling its fourth official Mercedes-AMG Petronas team watch, and easily its most colourful.

Priced at $12,300, the Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team has a 41mm Grade 5 titanium case and, for the first time in IWC’s Pilot’s collection, a deep-purple dial – which was inspired by Singapore’s national flower, the Papilionanthe Miss Joaquim.

Petronas-green numerals, indexes and luminous hands punch through the purple, while a matching rubber strap completes the look. Inside is IWC’s column-wheel 69385 automatic chronograph movement, with a 46-hour power reserve.

The colour came from a wider Mercedes push around the Singapore night race, encompassing team apparel and an Adidas capsule collection.

Grainger-Herr admits the idea did not immediately fill him with confidence.

“We make a purple watch,” he recalls thinking. “It wasn’t too promising from the outset.”

Then he saw it.

The dial had depth; the green accents worked; the titanium kept everything grounded.

It was, he concedes, “really, really beautiful”.

He is already working on another watch he has wanted for years.

An endurance athlete himself, Grainger-Herr wants a proper mechanical sports watch he can actually read while running hard, without resorting to fitness trackers.

A working movement prototype landed on his desk recently. The final design has not been settled.

Or perhaps it has.

“We may have,” he says, “but I can’t commit to that in case I change my mind.”