Brands / IWC Schaffhausen
IWC Schaffhausen
- Group
- Richemont, since 2000.
- Headquarters
- Schaffhausen, on the Rhine in German-speaking Switzerland — far from the Jura valleys where most Swiss watchmaking sits.
- Founded
- 1868, by Florentine Ariosto Jones, a watchmaker from Boston who set out to combine American factory methods with Swiss hand skills, using the river for power.
- Known for
- Portugieser (first made in 1939 for two Portuguese merchants who wanted a wristwatch with pocket-watch precision), Pilot’s Watches (Big Pilot, Mark series), Ingenieur (antimagnetic, 1955; redrawn by Gérald Genta in 1976), Portofino, Aquatimer.
- Scale
- About 118,000 watches and CHF 573 million in 2025, twelfth among Swiss brands. Estimate: Morgan Stanley / LuxeConsult, February 2026; IWC publishes no figures of its own.
Jones’s company nearly failed twice before the Schaffhausen industrialist Johannes Rauschenbach-Vogel bought it in 1880; his family and their heirs, including the psychologist Carl Jung by marriage, kept it for a century. IWC passed to VDO and Mannesmann in the 1970s and 1990s, and to Richemont in 2000 together with Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne.