The Gentleman Explorer
In less than a decade Christoph Grainger-Herr, the Chief Executive of IWC Schaffhausen, has taken a manufacture associated with adventurous pursuits into new territory — while addressing horology’s duty to nourish the human soul.
As a child in the 1980s, Christoph Grainger-Herr was taken by his father to a watch boutique in Bern, close to the family holiday home in Switzerland. There, while his father pored over the latest options for a Nautilus in steel, the young Grainger-Herr examined the pieces around him, unwittingly forging an emotional bond with horology that would become his life calling.
Forty years (and a degree in interior design and career stints in architecture and marketing) later, Grainger-Herr is the Chief Executive of IWC Schaffhausen, a position he has held since 2016. In the past nine years he has kept IWC’s time-honoured lines fresh with thoughtful evolutionary steps; overseen the design and construction of a state-of-the-art 13,500m2 production facility in the brand’s native Schaffhausen; nurtured the maison’s relationship with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team; launched IWC’s own Racing Team at the 2018 Goodwood Members’ Meeting; executed the pioneering use of advanced materials such with the philosophy of founder Florentine Ariosto Jones, grown a complications department whose greatest achievement to date is a Portugieser, revealed last year, that can take leap-year exceptions in its stride for the next 45 million years.
A cyclist, husband and father of three (as well as one of watchmaking’s most affable, eloquent and perspicacious leaders), Grainger-Herr chewed the fat with The Rake during a brief visit to London for the premiere of F1 the Movie, a cinematic gem in which IWC have a starring role alongside Brad Pitt and Damson Idris.
I would look at IWC watches in a shop window in Bournemouth, walking to my university lectures. I immediately loved the purity, the clarity, the restraint, the understated technical look. Later, I was working in Zurich as an interior designer, doing high-end offices, golf clubs and restaurants, when a phone call came in from Richemont inviting us to pitch for an IWC museum. I jumped at that opportunity and rendered my heart out on my laptop in the basement of my apartment. Three days later we presented a concept to IWC. They loved it. When I first walked into this company, I loved the vibe, the atmosphere, the people, and it felt like home. And that’s never changed. One thing led to another, and here we are.
I love the duality of the artistic and the technical. Architects work between the two because, ultimately, when you’re creating a built environment, you want something that speaks to people like an artwork, which creates an atmosphere and an emotional response, but also as an architect your work has to stay up. Everything has to come together. Watches really deliver on that concept.
Watches are about emotional response. The technical complexity behind that is mesmerising, but you don’t have to understand it to enjoy the watch. You can just wear and love the watch — job done. But if you do want to know, there is all this discovery to be enjoyed: people you can meet, history to be discovered, lots of Easter eggs and stories. There’s real scope to immerse yourself, if you wish. This is why sometimes people describe our business as one that juggles being a fashion brand and an enthusiast’s car company. It’s quite true.
Humans grapple with an innate fear of mortality. And transmissional products like watches create legacy as a response to that. It makes us feel good when our values endure, when wealth that’s created has been looked after — or when things we’ve built get passed down generations. Watches are one of the very few personal items, along with jewellery, that do get passed down, and to which people have a real emotional connection.
Watches have a deeper meaning than just consumption. There are a lot of objects that surround us today — increasingly so, unfortunately — that we replace and update all the time. You can’t form emotional bonds with objects like that. Watches — as well as offering a counterpoint to this idea of constantly throwing everything away, to our detriment — become part of your personal story. They’re a refreshing reminder of what designing and making and buying things actually means.
Another human need is to push the boundaries of the feasible beyond what is necessary. You see this from early humans decorating their tools. It speaks so much to this core human need to do things that are unnecessary, to have fun with things, to try and implant our genius into a product. During Covid, everything stopped — but people didn’t stop dreaming. Even in the darkest of days we still want this escapism.
Continuity is healthy. It’s reassuring to think that companies like us have been in the heart of Europe for over 150 years, designing, making, marketing, creating things. It all happens for generations in the same location, not scattered around the globe, and you can go and see it. And it’s in a great environment where people have good jobs, good opportunities, good lifestyles, and it’s looking after the environment and the community. It proves that there is a way to make products that isn’t hugely wasteful.
Continuity and innovation is a balancing act. Hopefully a pilot’s watch from 20, 30, 40 years ago is essentially the same as a pilot’s watch in 2025 or 2035. But then we need reinvention, newness, and to respond to trends — not in a fashion kind of way, but in every era there is a cultural response in our designs to the zeitgeist and thelargertrendsinsociety.That’swhychangeisslow,incremental. With some pieces — sports watches, pilot watches, Aquatimer — we’re more open when it comes to playing with colours, forms, materials. There are some watches just around the corner now that are totally new in their expression.
Watch buyers are getting considerably younger. And the first brand interactions are now between the social media intermediaries and consumers. My 16-year-old son can give me, across many product segments, exact pyramid classifications of which brands are at the top, which brands are totally unacceptable, who wears what, and so on. He’s not been exposed to these products. He’s not been to their stores. This is purely through secondary sources on social media. We’re now facing a generation that has fully formed brand opinions long before we’re talking to them for the first time. If you mess that one up, you have a problem down the line.
We don’t have pre-formed attitudes about anything technological. We like to explore what is the way to make the best watches we can. Much of our history is based around this idea of an instrument watch — on watches for navigation and later for aviation, later for diving, and later for racing. That’s why there is no unnecessary decoration on our dials. We try not to make things overly complicated.
Ingenuity can be simple. Look all the way back to [IWC watchmaking legend] Kurt Klaus: when you look at his [Da Vinci Chronograph] Perpetual Calendar [from 1985], he created a mechanism that was ingenious but also as simple as possible, using this idea of a wheel adjusted by a single crown to do everything a perpetual calendar does. Fast-forward to the Eternal Calendar last year, and there’s only this tiny component, the 400-year gear, to turn the same programming mechanism into something that runs all the way to the year 4,000. Both are examples of this spirit of not trying to pursue complication for complication’s sake, but to make things that are ingenious, robust, workable and easy to operate. That’s something we retain in everything we do.
We have two innovation drivers. One, the Perpetual Studio, is a fine watchmaking department where it’s all about ingenuity, creativity and craftsmanship to create these beautiful mechanisms. And then we have the XPL division, which is all about the harder technical sports innovation: shock absorption, materials, toughness — more of that cold, hard engineering side of innovation, with sparks flying.
We’re now facing a generation that has fully formed brand opinions long before we talk to them.
Youthful innovation is crucial. Last week we had this year’s Apprentice Challenge, which sees young watchmakers design watches, conceptualise them, create technical solutions, make presentations. They work across the company to get every component engineered and the watch constructed. When you look at what these 18-, 19-year-old watchmakers are able to produce! It’s untypical of watchmaking, which is traditionally a very introverted, very isolated endeavour. Seeing their passion for an idea, how they jump the hurdles to make a product one can hold and wear, and it works... it’s amazing. The Tourbillon Day & Night function in the Portugieser and Ceralume® — the luminous ceramic material — came out of the Apprentice Challenge.
There’s not much we can’t crack with science. In the end, if all goes well, you have a very beautiful, simple solution, like Einstein’s general relativity: an incredibly complex concept to grapple with — that you can take a shortcut through time — but the maths works it out. And going back to Kurt Klaus and [former IWC Technical Director] Albert Pellaton, this is the ambition of watchmakers as well — to take a very complex problem and find a beautifully simple solution to crack it.
Technology can solve problems traditional craftsmanship can’t. That’s why that 400-year gear is photolithographic — it’s actually grown like a semiconductor — which allows you to create an intricate little gear with perfectly flat teeth that you couldn’t machine on any machine. Suddenly, this age-old analogue machine got a whole lot better.
Formula One has gone from being a niche, elite sport into a broad cultural lifestyle platform. So when Hollywood comes in to do the dramatisation of something that is already highly entertaining, that becomes the blueprint, and I think it’s going to have a really interesting knock-on effect. What [director] Joseph Kosinski and [producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, with [cinematographer] Chloe Miranda, have achieved is to give a completely new visual experience to Formula One, which is radically different from what we are used to.
