ArtistSwiss
INTERNATIONAL WATCH Co
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In 1868, American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones traveled to Schaffhausen on the Rhine and chose it for a specific reason: the river's powerful current could drive industrial machinery, and local labour costs were low. He founded the International Watch Company with the explicit plan to merge American-style factory production with Swiss hand finishing, targeting the United States market. The experiment was bold for its era, and the company passed into Swiss hands within two decades when the Rauschenbach family acquired it in 1880 after financial difficulties.
Schaffhausen sits in eastern Switzerland, far from the Jura arc where most Swiss watchmaking is concentrated. IWC has remained there ever since, and it is still the only major manufacture in that part of the country. The isolation shaped the brand's identity: rather than following valley conventions, IWC developed a reputation for engineering-first design, in particular the integration of large pocket-watch movements into wristwatch cases.
The most enduring expression of that approach came in 1939, when Portuguese importers commissioned a series of extra-large wristwatches housing high-precision pocket-watch calibres. The resulting reference 325 - later called the Portugieser - had a 43 mm case at a time when wristwatches rarely exceeded 35 mm. Decades later, a 1993 Jubilee edition revived the line and helped establish the market appetite for oversized dress watches that has defined fine watchmaking ever since.
Alongside the Portugieser, IWC built a parallel identity around aviation instruments. Pilot's watches from the mid-20th century featured anti-magnetic soft-iron inner cases, oversized crowns, and luminous numerals designed for cockpit readability. The Big Pilot's Watch, introduced in 1940 and reissued in modern form, became a reference point in tool-watch design. In 2001 the brand introduced the calibre 5000 family, an in-house movement built first for the Portugieser but later migrated across the collection, bringing a perpetual calendar module that requires adjustment only at century turns not divisible by 400.
In 2000 IWC was acquired by Richemont, the Swiss luxury group that also owns Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre. The acquisition provided capital for expanded in-house movement development, including the Portugieser Sidérale Scafusia - an astronomically complex piece that displays sidereal time and a personalized celestial map - and, in 2024, the Portugieser Eternal Calendar with a 400-year gear mechanism.
On the Nordic auction market IWC watches appear consistently at Swedish houses, with Kaplans Auktioner accounting for the majority of lots. The 21 items in our database are all catalogued under Watches. Top results have included an early "Fancy Lugs" reference that fetched 15,400 SEK and a ladies' wristwatch at 5,400 SEK, suggesting a mid-tier secondary market for vintage IWC references in Sweden.