We had the opportunity to sit down with IWC’s Associate Director of Watch and Movement Assembly, Markus Bühler, and pick his brains on all things IWC Schaffhausen. Here is what we found out…
The watch world is such an interesting world, mainly due to the people who live and breathe it day to day. By that I mean those who work in the brands that we all love and are the ones responsible for driving them forward. Be it the CEO, or the Brand Director, the watchmakers working tirelessly in the Manufacture, or those responsible for the designs we find so attractive. Whomever you talk to, they always have a story to tell, and none more so than IWC’s Associate Director of Watch and Movement Assembly, Markus Bühler who has been pivotal in IWC’s movement development over his career, so much so, that he even has two watches named after him!
We sat down with Markus during Watches & Wonders this year, and picked his brains on what motivates him to do what he does, how IWC is pushing forward with their in-house movements, and of course, his involvement in the world record-holding Portugieser Eternal Calendar that was the talk of the show!
For a man who started out as a carpenter, and is now largely responsible for some of IWC’s high-end movements, he’s achieved a lot over his career but still remains very humble about this, with a sense of pride and humility, which you will see evidence of below. He is a people person and believes this is where the heart of watchmaking lies, the people. And we don’t think he is wrong as at the end of the day, watches have this funny ability to connect people together from all over the world. Watch fairs like Watches & Wonders, Geneva Watch Days, and even local get-togethers are evidence of this.
The other thing very evident when talking to Markus is his passion, for IWC and watches in general, and for those that are reading this and not following something they are passionate about, Markus is a walking example of making a change and following a dream!
“I started my career as a carpenter, and after 10 years of this, I decided to stop because this profession didn’t fill me with passion, I felt that it was not right. I was looking for a new career and watchmaking had always been on my mind, ever since I was a little boy. Thankfully IWC gave me the chance to start as an older apprentice, and for that, I’ve been thankful for most of my life, as it has absolutely not felt like working.”
Hearing this, you can’t help but feel a little inspired, and personally, we can resonate with this as Watch Advice was a passion project and a dream originally that has (but not for a lot of hard work) come to life for all of us who work here. Talking to Markus, he describes it as a sort of miracle he’s been able to do what he does over the past two decades or more, and how his career grew from an apprentice to now.
“Yes, it was a miracle for me. For the past 23 years, I have been able to do something I love. After I finished my apprenticeship, I took over the position of prototype watchmaker, which is just one of the many positions in the company I had the chance to fill. After that, I took over the lead of industrialisation – we cared for the processes which are necessary to produce quality watches. After doing this for a while, I had the chance to take over the assembly department where I could see each process step by step. So for the last 23 years for me, everything has felt right, and everything I wanted IWC gave me a chance to do it, so yeah I’m in a lucky situation!“
Unlike your standard office job, Markus’s day-to-day isn’t the same. When asked about this, he chuckles with a smile as he finds the right way to articulate this, which he does wonderfully given his job title. He can be doing any of a hundred things in any given week, but at its core, it is all about the watch movement and watch assembly, and both he cares deeply about.
“I care about what we produce, and that we assemble watches at the highest quality. The daily business is linked to people because the work of assembling movements in watches is done by people. So, people relationships is one of the key points you have to manage as an Associate Director. It’s not just about the watches themselves. That said, I often go into the [watchmaking] department to see if everything is running and as was taught as a watchmaker because it is important that the quality level is the highest it can be every time.“
And while we could talk more about this, our time is limited with Markus, so we need to come to the topic of the Portugieser Eternal Calendar. Now for those playing catch up, the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar was one of the stars of Watches & Wonders 2024. IWC Schaffhausen is known for their Perpetual Calendars, and has some of the nicest PC’s on the market today – like those released at this year’s show.
However, the Portugieser Eternal Calendar is not your everyday Perpetual Calendar. It has a moonphase that is accurate to 1 day in 45,000,000 years, which when you think about this feat of engineering, is just crazy. Sometimes we forget that these watches are tiny machines and calculators of sorts, and they can adjust for the days, months, years, and leap years, not to mention moonphases, and all by gears, wheels, and cogs on your wrist!
Talking to Markus about this, we wanted to find out a little more from his perspective about how this came to be, and how much input he and his team had with the Eternal Calendar. To start with, we ask about the conceptualisation of the piece, and just how, or more accurately speaking, WHY make the Eternal Calendar?
“I mean IWC as an “engineering brain” [so to speak] is never comfortable with what we’ve achieved, and we always want to go further and further and further. If you look at the history of perpetual calendars, we started in 1985 with the perpetual calendar where the moon phase was accurate for 122 years. This meant after 122 years you have a deviation of one day and being a perpetual calendar, that means we also need to consider all the leap years.”
“As a second stage, we improved the moon phase precision by 577 years. While this was great, we were never comfortable with the results, we wanted to go further. We decided to work on both the moonphase and the Perpetual Calendar itself, which we changed to an Eternal Calendar. What does this mean? It means we now respect the rules of 100 years – which is exactly the same rules as for the leap year. The leap year describes the four-year cycle: Over three years, there are no leap years, and in the fourth there is. So, looking at 100 years, the space is the same in a 400-year cycle. The first 300 years are no leap years and the last hundred in that 400-year cycle there is and we implemented this in the perpetual calendar to make it Eternal.”
RELATED READING: IWC Receives Guinness World Record For The Eternal Calendar
As a slight aside, the Gregorian calendar only runs up to the year 3999, and we don’t know if the year 4000 will be a leap year or not. When we first heard this, it’s strange as you think of time as being more or less linear and how hard is it to work out if the year 4000 will be a leap year or not? But the fact is, the Earth, Sun, and Moon are not designed by humans to work on our system of time. It’s the other way around. We have based our entire timekeeping system on the rotation of the Earth, the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and the Moon’s rotation around the Earth, all of which are not exact to our method of time. Due to this, we as humans have, and will again need to, adjust the years and our tracking of time to make up for those small seconds, minutes, and hours we lose over the course of a year, decade, and centuries.
But if it was decided that the year 4000 was in fact a leap year, then according to Markus, the 577-year accuracy we now have for the moonphase in an IWC Perpetual Calendar wouldn’t be enough. “So we calculated by 22 trillion calculation runs on a gear train to get us to a theoretical 45,000,000 year accuracy of the moon phase. Together, this is a very good showcase for eternity and for the engineering approach of IWC.“
While Markus wasn’t designing the Eternal Calendar, he and his team played a large role in bringing this piece to fruition.
“Personally, being responsible for movement assembly I care about the assembly process along with our most skilled watchmakers, so we took over the concept from R&D with the prototypes and tried to assemble the first movements to find out if it worked. In order to reach the quality levels customers expect, we would then give feedback to the R&D team to improve on the right things.”
And not surprisingly, there are not a lot of people who are skilled or qualified to work on such a movement. It takes a lot of brains and many years of expertise to do this. Markus explains: “This is a very special, high-complication piece and we have just a handful of watchmakers who are able to assemble such a specialty piece like the Portugieser Eternal Calendar. The other area we needed to focus on for this complication that is important was the tuning – you have to tune the calendar, you have to program it to make sure that the calendar is “eternal” and doesn’t shift on the wrong movement.”
Complex movements require answers to complex questions, and having heard Physicist, Brian Cox talk about time and eternity, it was time to ask our own tough question of Markus. Yes, it’s silly, but one we as watch nerds need to ask… If you had to pick one watch, one that is sentimental to you or your career with IWC, what would that be? What’s that one piece that holds a special place in your heart? His answer, while sounding like a deferral to the question really sums up Markus Bühler, a lover of watches with a deep love of IWC.
“This question I ask myself many times, but I cannot answer this question because every watch we produce, every watch we develop is one thing that has gone through my organisation and the watchmaker’s hands. When we think about the process and how we create watches, a Pilot Mark 20 is absolutely the same in my mind as a Perpetual Calendar – for me there is no difference between the different model types. For me, every watch is something unique we produce.”
But there is one watch that is special, and this is the watch, or rather the two watches that are named after him – the IWC Big Pilot Markus Bühler. The original ref. 5003 was created back in 2003, during the Prix IFHH de l’Horlogerie for apprentice watchmakers in Switzerland. For this competition, Markus came up with a simple yet remarkable timepiece, and out of a total of 64 contestants, Markus’s design emerged victorious. IWC went on to produce 12 pieces as a limited edition which eventually went to market in 2008, and last year, IWC brought back the modern interpretation of the watch with the Big Pilot 43 Tourbillon Markus Bühler. So, an interview with the man himself would not be complete without asking about this. His reaction was priceless as Markus was lost for word for a little bit – literally speechless!
“Yeah, I’m really speechless because I had the chance in my early days as a watchmaker to win this competition and IWC gave me the chance. We, together, produced 12 of these watches out of this competition 15 years ago and recently we decided together, “Hey, let’s have a look at all the themes to bring in a new edition of the watch”. So we chose the Tourbillon, and I mean it’s one of the highest complications and I was proud to work on the tourbillon with the teams to bring this signature design to market. And if you ask me if I’m proud, I think I’m very proud to make all these customers happy.
RELATED READING: The IWC Big Pilot Markus Bühler Edition Is Back!
His reaction and expressions as he’s talking about this are of pure joy, excitement, and pride from a man who puts his heart and soul into the watches he works on. Markus mentions people again and reinforces our earlier points on watches connecting people from around the world as coincidentally, he met a couple of customers who purchased the new iteration of his namesake.
“In fact, just today I met two of the owners of this watch, and when I saw them and their smile, I realised I did something right! Yes, I’m proud. I think about that point and I’m proud to have these happy customers. They travelled such a long way from Australia to Switzerland to pick up the watch and meet me before dinner, and then we talked about watches and all these passion points. I think this is something which is unbelievable!
This is probably one of the best parts of this industry, the connections you make as you go through your journey as a collector, or your journey working in the industry for a brand, retail outlet, or like us, the media. Yes, the watches are fun and what draws us all together, but the people are what make it.
Before we said goodbye, we had to ask Markus if he had ever been to Australia before.
“No, no unfortunately not. I have to do this this! It’s funny, you know I’m absolutely a fan of these gold mining guys (Talking about the reality show, Aussie Gold Hunters) who are looking for gold with these detectors in these fields. I have to get down there one day!”
We hope he does make it down to see us one day, and as we were able to see his part of the world during our visit to the IWC Manufacture in Schaffhausen, it would be great to host him in ours. But before we say our final goodbyes, we need to ask the ultimate watch question – what watch are you wearing today?
“I am wearing a 3716. It’s a very special piece because it was a gift from IWC for my 20th anniversary with IWC. It’s not from the new collection, but it’s a timeless piece!”
And this is where we wrapped up the conversation with Markus. It was great to meet him personally and talk with someone who has so much passion for what they do and still loves their job and career after 23 years. In fact it’s not uncommon to meet people who have worked in the watch industry and same company for a long time, even to the point for some, it’s a generational occupation. For Markus Bühler, it’s a lifelong love of watches, and dedication to the company that gave him his start and helped make his personal dream a reality.
