Swiss watchmaker extraordinaire IWC recently celebrated the launch of their new Portugieser models by throwing a spectacular event in the Zaha Hadid designed Ordrupgaard Museum just outside Copenhagen. We got a chance to see the full range of the collection (and were asked to dress up to match them!) before sitting down to cocktails and dinner. Experts were also on site to explain exactly what goes on inside these beautiful pieces. But what goes on in the mind of the man in charge of designing them? Robin sat down with Chief Design Officer Christian Knoop in the new IWC store in Copenhagen to find out.
How did you end up being the Chief Design Officer at IWC?
My background is in industrial design. The first thing I did after my studies was an internship as a carpenter, as that was my training. After that, I started with design and for a couple of years, I worked for international agencies, focusing on product design and brand consultancy but then 16 years ago, I got into IWC. When I joined, I had no record in watch design. I’ve designed furniture, lighting, domestic appliances, consumer electronics, and even aircraft interiors, but not watches. So entering this industry was very exciting for me.
In the beginning, I said to myself: okay, I’ve designed so many technical products, so a watch is just another. But the more I worked with watch design, the more I realised that there’s a fundamental difference because a watch is a very emotional object. I’ve learned from talking to customers that watches are very personal, carrying many emotional stories: they have inherited, purchased or acquired them in special moments of their lives. So a watch is not just a couple of hundred parts of steel and gold, but it carries the personal memories that are attached to it.
To design something you need to be inspired. What inspires you?
Many designers would probably say that they’re inspired by art, music, fashion and so on. Everything is all true, but I fundamentally believe that as a designer you look at the world with different eyes, the same as a musician would listen to the world with different ears, or a chef would taste different flavours: as a designer, you can find inspiration in the most minor things and details around you. That can be a piece of furniture, a train, an object on a flea market, an object I discovered on the street, where I notice material combinations and finishes.
At IWC, I’m working with a team of creatives that basically take care of the entire brand in 360 degrees. Yes, we design watches at the heart but we also do corporate design, prints, packaging, the interior designs of our boutiques and more. And this is all influenced by each other and goes together: some packaging might inspire us and we use a detail from it in one of our next films for example…
We have a very versatile team of creatives coming from different backgrounds, different nationalities and different ages. Coming from industrial design, interior design, graphic design, advertising, and typography. So it’s a very creative space with a powerful team that is not shy of any challenges and where inspiration can come from different perspectives. On top of that, we have the Richemont-owned Creative Academy in Milan where a lot of talented and creative people can come in.
So sometimes we get tasks such as designing things for a Formula 1 car, or for a boat or basically an object you would have never considered a watch brand should be doing.
The fact that you’ve been there for 16 years shows that you still enjoy it!
Absolutely. I had worked with agencies before and with every new product, there was a new client, and we would dive into a new world every single time. They have their own production methods, their own materials and distribution channels, and working with such clients is fundamentally different and I always like that. But also now we have a lot of partners we work with, from the automotive sector, yachts, or even with artists like Mark Ong, who is a Singapore-based artist customising sneakers. So we also dive with these projects into new worlds and discover new things and you get a lot of creative input and you can learn a lot. Recently we worked again with Mercedes and it was exciting to work on such a secret project to design an analogue dashboard clock for a pure speed model.
How do you achieve the balance between traditional watchmaking techniques and modern elements?
One of the challenges we have with every new collection is to find a good balance between the past and the future. We have added new editions to the PORTUGIESER collection this year. The collection is more than 80 years old, well-established in the history of the brand as one of the most iconic watches and also a watch that many customers already know. But we still want to push the boundaries and surprise our customers with something new and unexpected, so we have to find this exact balance to create something that’s recognisable yet new. And it’s very hard to find this balance especially nowadays when the watch market is very crowded. You have an endless number of products coming to the market every day, and many of them are very well-designed. So what makes a difference between another beautiful watch and a successful product is this part of identity: a product that has a character, stands out, can be recognised by customers, can easily be associated with a brand and has the DNA of the brand. And that’s one of the key aspects we have back in our minds when we are designing new watches.
What are trends in the watch industry that you find exciting?
I am not focusing on trends at the current moment. It’s not easy to say anyway, as in the watch industry we can’t easily anticipate trends as we have long development times. We usually need around two to three years to develop a new watch and if we work on a movement, it can be even five to six years. However, we have seen in the watch industry a couple of years ago that there was a strong vintage trend going on. Now we see that there’s a trend towards sports watches and people go for metal bracelets again, especially with integrated bracelets. Also, we see a bigger demand for smaller watch diameters. Twenty years ago, it was all about big watches and now it is getting more balanced. And of course, besides trends, you have colours that come and go. But I am also convinced that the trend for vintage watches will come back at some point and sports watches will maybe slow down a bit.
We can see a lot of ceramic watches lately on the market. Is it also a trend for you?
We don’t look at ceramics as a trend as we see this as one of our core competencies and one of our core innovation territories, as we were the first brand to come with ceramic watches in the 80s. And over the last decades, we have really broadened our expertise by experimenting with ceramics and bringing ceramic components into the movements. So for us working on ceramics is a mission in one of the central competencies of the brand. But for sure with ceramics come certain colour trends, for example, we introduced a colour for a special edition of Top Gun two years ago, and not a long time ago we introduced Ceralume, a full glowing ceramic. (The Editors’ note: read more here about it)
Our last question is a little more personal. If you had to choose just one watch, what it would be?
For me, it’s very difficult to pick a favourite. I mean I’ve worked on all of them… But as a creative, I’m not a person looking back and I am not a watch collector either. I am very much in the future so the watch that keeps me busy and has my attention is the one coming out in two years. I am proud to have launched such collections we did with the entire team, but it’s not really that I would look back and say, okay, that’s my favourite.
Copenhagen’s newly opened IWC boutique
