2012 was IWC’s year of their Pilot’s watch. Just before IWC is ready to launch the new Ingenieur collection in the next coming weeks at SIHH 2013, we look back at the Pilot collection with IWC’s Creative Director, Christian Knoop. The introduction party of the new Pilot collection during the SIHH in Geneva last year has been topic of several discussions. Here in The Netherlands, we had our own introduction day of the new IWC (TOP Gun) Pilot collection. A report of that day can be found by clicking here. For the Father & Son Pilot collection, we decided to use different colors for the dial and Super Luminova.
Whether it was positive or not, at least IWC got everyone’s attention for the Pilot collection. I sat down with Mr Knoop in the Dylan hotel in Amsterdam and asked him the following questions:
Mr Knoop, how did you end up working in the watch industry?
I almost had seen every type of product except cars and watches. It was actually by coincidence that I ended up in the watch industry. Compared to the products I’ve work with before, timepieces are certainly the most emotional products. That’s very special in this era. However, my team and I do more than timepieces only. We have a team of 12 designers in Schaffhausen and 5 of them are constantly working on watches. Before I started working for replica IWC, I’ve been active for a lot of different industries. Other members of the team work on our IWC boutiques, packaging, gifts and basically every visual aspect of IWC replica watches. However, the timepieces are our center point of attention.
What struck me most – besides the timepieces – is that at the basis of these products is a company with a long history which does everything by themselves from design to the actual production process of the watch. It’s just wonderful how involved our customers are with our products. Every time I talk to IWC collectors, IWC fans or to the people who visit our museum in Schaffhausen I am amazed how emotional they get about our brand. We also decided to produce both models in stainless steel (as opposed to the platinum & steel set from the previous collection), as we’ve learned that this combination should become affordable for more customers.
It really fascinates me and gives me a lot of input in my work. It displays that it is more than ‘just a watch’ to people, several people live for watches. I live for watches. The Big Pilot (Father’s watch) is an iconic watch already and has its own group of followers. Wasn’t it hard to change certain things about this replica watch, such as the black dial? On to the watches. The Pilot collection has been IWC’s focus in 2012. Let’s start with the new Pilot Father & Son timepieces that were introduced in 2012.
Replica IWC’s year of their Pilot’s watch
