What's wrong with IWC?

why isn't IWC more popular they are the 10th most recognized Swiss watch brand in the world and yet they sell less than 130,000 watches compared to rolex's 1.2 million and of the top 50 Swiss Brands their average retail price is only in 30th Place they have an eternal calendar they have a watch with 168 hours of power Reserve they have the Top Gun watch why don't they sell more and why can't they command even higher prices today we're going to talk through all the key challenges I think IWC have and I'll be covering sizing pricing

complications and positioning desirability identity and design language before we dive in let's get ourselves onto the same page in terms of who and what IWC are today IWC has been around since 1868 this is an old watch maker they have an interesting backstory being actually kind of American in the origins as the founders were American based on brand recognition IWC is quite a well-known brand typically scoring high on brand recognition benchmarks they typically score ahead of Brands like Vashon julta hublo and even chuda if you ask a nonat nerd to name 10 watch brands together

with apple Rolex K and Tech Hoya IWC is going to be there now the next piece is an important piece of information because in terms of sheer volume they put out less than 150,000 watches a year that's one tenth of what Ro sells and 1/5th of what Omega sells it's also about a third less than chuda 150,000 is not nothing Zenith sells less than 15,000 so when Brit Pierce says no one buys IWC it has to be seen in the context of this brand that is 100 years old that has huge brand recognition but nowhere

near the performance of other brands that have similar levels of recognition that and we just don't talk about them as much as chudo Rolex or Omega they aren't ignored but they do not get a lot of coverage relative to their historical status I'm going to start by agreeing with brus Brit did a video on this topic a while back and it was actually what got me thinking about IWC IWC does have a problem to some extent with size 38 to 41 mm is the sweet spot for a lot of people these days it is literally

the Contemporary size range and IWC has a lot of watches that don't conform to that they still have big Pilots at 43 mm Aqua timers and even the Portuguese at 42 mm which was originally designed I know to be a larger style dress watch but it just doesn't speak to Modern audiences as much it's not just the case size though it's also the thickness the aquatimer is a chunky boy at 14.1 mm in thickness and it has no sloping bezel it's nowhere near as wearable under a cuff as a Submarina or a CQ or a

300M the same goes for their pilot chronographs that still use chunky movements putting them at 14 1 12 mm again a lot thicker than any chuda Rolex or Zenith competitive pricing you have these big Pilots priced at $10,000 a steel watch on a leather strap with a huge power Reserve priced like a steel Submarina you have the engineer priced $1,000 and then you have more affordable entry models like the mark 20 the entry portenos and other watches that go for somewhere between 42 and $8,000 you also have highend complications like Eternal calendars that go for

hundreds of thousands of dollars this is where I have a little bit of a different perspective on compared to Brit for me it's not about competitive pricing as such I mean we all want cheaper watches most of us feel brands are overcharging but what we feel is not really relevant as long as the brand can sell their watches Morgan Stanley though indicate that the average retail price on IWC is around 7,000 Swiss Franks that tells me that IWC are primarily selling their cheaper inventory and not their more expensive stuff think of chuda their 41 mm

black Bay costs $4,400 their Chrono costs about $800 more IWC on the other hand the distance from the IWC pilot Mark 20 to the chrona is $25,000 the IWC engineer which is a very good-looking watch which is aenta which is harder to manufacture than a standard IWC pilot Mark 20 still has the same movement inside and they want you to pay $4,000 more more than a regular Mark 20 the IWC catalog to me has some unusual jumps in it that make their pricing seam off consider for a moment Rolex how does Rolex generally build up

their catalog well that's simple you have your entry steel models then you can upgrade to twoone from there you can go to full gold on oyster flex and from there you can upgrade to a full gold case add bracelet and finally you can upgrade to platinum and diamonds materials are what differentiate the jumps and upgrades with Rolex the models don't really change that much in terms of movements or complications on the other end of the spectrum you have somebody like chuda they don't really have a lot of upgrades sure there's a full gold black Bay

in the mix and there are some models in Chone but generally chuda offers Alternatives at similar prices but not so much in terms of upgrades IWC is more like Rolex but in a I feel less consistent way so IWC has a very clear entry level and then you jumped to premium models and then you have a further jump to Specialty models so in my classification the pilot Mark 20 is the entry the big pilot 43 is the premium model and the Top Gun Woodland in ceramic is the specialty the IWC upgrades don't necessarily just follow

materials like Rolex do though so it's not just steel and then twoone and then finally full gold but the levels as I see them are there in the case of the pilot it's a mix of movement upgrades Legacy designs and also specialty materials the story is the same for the aquatimer the entries at around $7 8,000 the premium models of the chronographs with the unique materials and the specialty models are the aquat timers with the perpetual calendar complications the problem as I see it is that the jumps and the pricing seems disconnected so you get

your regular pilot Chrono 41 mm with 46 Al of power reserve for $8,500 and right next to it you have the pilot performance Chrono for 11,000 sure it's titanium but the milling and the manufacturing process does not add a proportional extra level of cost to justify that difference the portuguesa in a chronograph model cost $8,400 which is similar to the pyot Chrono that makes sense but right next to it you've got a Portuguese and 42 mm that's 13,500 now the reason is a massive power reserve a better movement a gold rotor this thing is objectively

stunning but I more or less know what I'm paying for and that's the movement most people don't and also because IWC isn't recognized as a high horology brand I think there aren't a lot of people that feel that upgrade in price makes sense the jump to me at least seems disconnected and I don't always think they make sense to a regular buyer I don't think they understand the reasoning behind the jumps from steel to twoone is easy to explain more gold equals more expensive from time only to manual wind with 7 Days of power Reserve

isn't intuitively logical for non-at enthusiasts so I'm a big fan of Marquez brownley and he's especially got this breakdown of the Apple upgrade paths that I really really love so you start with wanting the base entry iPad but the one you want only has 128 GB of space the entry iPad doesn't have 256 GB so you have to upgrade to the better iPad with 256 gigs but that one doesn't have the nicer display so you go a step up and every step is seemingly small but you inevitably end up going quite a few steps up

without noticing it and I think they just too many situations where the regular customer looks at the IWC upgrades and thinks that jumps too big and for what so to me it's not so much about competitive pricing but about having a catalog that price-wise fits with Buyers expectations and about leading people up the funnel in a consistent fashion which customers understand here's a question for you who released one of the best complications this year at watches and wonders obviously because this is a video about IWC you can surmise that I think it's IWC with the

Eternal calendar but how often would you leap to IWC when thinking about complications your mind would go to mpnf or pic or JRA or Langan Zera IWC has amazing complications some of them represent immense value you often get a lot of complication for the money but to most people IWC is not a complication brand the kind of people who want to a perpetual calendar or moon phase or a worldtimer or a GMT or a minute repeater gravitate towards other brands an IWC big pilot perpetual calendar is cool but it plummets like a ton of bricks

on the secondary Market IWC May potentially be master watchmakers and Geniuses at complications but in the minds of many people this is not what they are they are seen as a simple tool watch brand and that doesn't necessarily hurt their volumes but it definitely affects their average sale price which which is around 7,000 Swiss Franks I'd even go so far as to say that there's a limit to how low you can go in terms of pricing to be able to convince somebody that you are a high horology brand being able to make an eternal calendar

is ridiculously cool but when your most popular watch likely sells at about $77,000 you don't come across as a real luxury brand I mean think of it this way would you take Rolls-Royce seriously if they sold a two-door electric car that competed with an entry PUO it would still be a luxury rolls but a twodo hatchback from rolls I don't think so I also think that the types of watches that they have in their catalog relative to what is currently popular is not really well matched things that are popular right now are dive watches sports

watches and integrated sports watches those are the top three in a distant fourth and fifth I think you have watches like sports chronographs and playful dress watches dive watches what's popular it's a black Bay 41 monochrome it's a Submariner it's a seyo 62 masas it's a c Master 300M the aquatimer is cool but it's a chunky internal dive bezel specialist diver and that's not going to cut it it's not contemporary long jeene jlc even Christopher W are trying to make compressive style watches happen but it just hasn't really caught on yet sports watches what's popular

well it's the date just it's the aquatera it's the normous club Sport and this is where it gets interesting on the bracelet the IWC pilot Mark 20 is repositioned as their sports watch but it's not quite it's a great watch but I think intuitively a lot of people don't categorize it as a sports watch as such I think IWC are totally aware of this there IWC portuguesa automatic has received a new bracelet it's a reworked version of the engineer and it's very similar to The Pilot Sport performance Pro maximum this is an acknowledgement of IWC

that they need a sports bracelet watch and this is a deliberate move to try and shift the position of the portuguesa out of the dress space and into that Sports bracelet space to become more relevant to a lot of buyers the problem is it's too big now they have an integrated bracelet watch that's doing really well for them they have the engineer that's spot on but then take the fourth challenge the sports Chrono this is where the Daytona lives the speed master dominates this is where Zenith released what a lot of people thought was a

plagiarized dayona unless you knew the history of it this is where jlc have tried to position the Polaris Chrono the IWC pilot Chrono does not live in the sports Chrono space so they built the pilot performance sport Chrono again to me it's an indication that idbc know that their products don't sufficiently line up with contemporary tastes they're not doing a bremont and throwing the baby out with the bath water and starting from scratch but they to me seem to be trying to shift their products in a direction that makes them more appealing to Modern consumers

because their traditional lineup doesn't align with what is contemporarily popular right now I'm not arguing in any way that they should throw out their lineup and make some generic divers generic Kronos and generic sports watches but I'm just pointing out that what they have in their classic core lineup does not currently align particularly well with what is generally popular right now IWC also lack a clear brand identity IWC stands for international watch company and for me it inadvertently describes the problem with IWC International watch company resonates with people in the same way that IBM resonates

with the name International Business Machines they might as well be called International generic Product Company igpc I'm not advocating again for IWC to change their name but as nondescript as their name is so is their identity chuda is about being dead daring Rolex is the Pinnacle of success Langer is all about finishing and high complications Christopher Ward is about value IWC does a lot of things right with Motorsports sponsorships and brand ambassadors and all that kind of stuff sometimes I feel like IWC are run by checklist so they sat down and said we must have

a sports watch check we must reposition the portuguesa check we must sponsor a sport check we must have a ceramic sport model check we must have an integrated bracelet model check all brands obviously do this to some extent but for IWC it feels a little bit soulless I don't want jeanclaude Beaver to come in and do another marketing revamp that turns IWC into a new pop culture phenomenon but they do need something they need a clearer narrative they need a more compelling story I'm not the future of the brand I don't have the solution but

they need something to spice them up Lewis Hamilton does it for some but I'm not sure it's enough last piece design language I've owned a pilot Chrono I own a pilot Mark 20 I sometimes dream about an engineer just not at retail I like their watches but and I'm being a little bit harsh their watches are good their pilots and big Pilots are icons in a way but not icons like the Daytona the portuguesa has has a cool history but it doesn't carry the cache of a Catra even the engineer is great but to some

extent it is also one of the other genter models they lack something that gets them from good to great it's back to that checklist approach again doing all the right things on paper seemingly addressing all the Strategic challenges but still resulting in something that works but feels kind of sterile or UD to forward this is where it's important to state that what I like for example in an IWC pilot Mark 20 I really really like that watch but that can be different from what I think needs to be in a pilot Mark 20 to make

it more popular in general the IWC pilot Mark 20 is a great watch but it doesn't have the shine of a deest and it doesn't have the personality of a sentos and I think that does sometimes for IWC limit them the portuguesa isn't playful like a normous tangente because of the size alone the portuguesa just isn't in the same category as a jlc master ultra thin or a calatrava the aquatimer isn't versatile like a c Master but it also can't really compete with a plpr all the watches are good but often when you put them

side by side with other brands I do think they are viewed as good but not great not special not to enough people at least there will be those of you out there that're like no I don't agree I love this watch so much and like I said I have a pilot Mark 20 I think they fantastic watches but when we're looking at it from a market perspective I think often when you take one of the botches and put them side by side with competitors a lot of people look at them and say it's a nice

watch and nice is not enough at that price most watch makers are having a bad year I don't know about IWC maybe they're bucking the trend I don't think so and I don't know it for a fact but I am however left with the feeling that people like me that love Pilots watches and ceramic Kronos you know the Tahoe the Woodland the Mojave and who also like the pilots are generally a Dying Breed I'm not a sustainable customer segment and I think IWC knows it I spoke to a friend the other day about a completely

different company we had a perspective on not in watches and our conclusion was that the company was likely doing all the right things and the kpis were all tracking in the right direction but strategically they were likely still stuck in the same place that's my feeling with WC they know their problems from a kpi perspective I think they're in a better place than they were they're checking the actions of the list but it doesn't feel like it's really getting into something that will put them in a better strategic position in the long term but who

knows most of the time all you need is one product and one launch where everybody goes mental and if you can capitalize on that then you're off to the races for the rest of you what are your thoughts on IWC what do they need to do to improve to do better what are they doing well let me know all your thoughts in the comments as usual like subscribe cheers