IWC, born in the USA
It’s easy to forget – IWC is, after all, very much a Swiss brand with a 150-year existence – but the company was actually founded by an American watchmaker. Florentine Ariosto Jones established his International Watch Company in Schaffhausen in 1868. He chose Switzerland for its skilled and inexpensive (sic!) workforce, the hydropower produced by the Rhine that ran alongside the future factory, and the country’s modern machine-tools. Jones planned to combine these assets with American industrial production methods to make competitively priced, quality watches which he would then export to the United States. And so IWC was born.