IWC Schaffhausen

Who are Switzerland’s best watchmakers: the French-speakers or those from the German-speaking part of the country? In Peter von Gunten’s case, the question is hardly relevant. Raised bilingually in the watchmaking city of Biel/Bienne, he is equally at home in both regions. The French side of his nature is perhaps not quite as picky as the German, while the German side may occasionally make him a tad more meticulous.

Be that as it may, he sees no influence of either culture on the art of watchmaking, which he, like many others in his family, learned here on the country’s language divide. No matter where you’re from, success as a watchmaker calls for solid training, nimble fingers and an ability to learn quickly. Plus a well-balanced disposition. Without it, you would be out of place in a watchmaking workshop. As would anyone who is unable to sit still for more than two minutes. Still, Peter von Gunten believes it is attitude rather than genetic predisposition that enables a watchmaker to find the equanimity needed for his job.

Peter von Gunten has played a major role in the rapid expansion of IWC’s service department in recent years. To a certain extent, the company’s enormous success is underpinned by the section’s 50 or so employees. For they service and maintain more than 16,000 watches each year, sent to Schaffhausen by owners from all over the world.

Properly maintained, a mechanical watch will go on running forever. However, it is vital that the abrasion inevitable in any mechanical movement be removed every five years, otherwise the watch’s accuracy will suffer. Lubricants, particularly those found in older watches, can turn resinous. Seals, which help to keep watches water-resistant, become brittle with time and need replacing. Overhauling a movement takes about five to six hours, but if the watch has complications this can easily extend to more than a whole working day. In the case of the celebrated Grande Complication with its perpetual calendar, minute repeater, chronograph and other features, it may take as much as 16 hours of painstaking manual labour to dismantle and reassemble the hundreds of individual parts with the same absolute precision that went into the original watch.

A specialist like von Gunten never ceases to be amazed by the complexities of mechanical timepieces. “The 28,800 beats per hour completed by the balance in some movements is a phenomenal achievement,” he explains. He experienced the watch crisis of the 1970s, when quartz movements threatened to oust mechanical ones. “But I never completely wrote off those little works of art,” he says, recalling possibly the most tumultuous period in the history of Swiss watchmaking. Nevertheless, he was forced by circumstances to give up his profession for a time, until IWC asked him to come back. He has never regretted it, although the demands have increased massively in the meantime. And they continue to rise. “For us, quality and customer satisfaction are a constant challenge,” says Peter von Gunten. Despite feeling so much at home in Schaffhausen, he still enjoys the occasional change of scene. So, two or three times a year, he leaves Swiss-German culture behind him and heads first for the south of France, and from there to Piedmont, where he enjoys walking and revisiting the vineyards for which he has developed an affection over the years.