It is a rare treat to start a meeting with a senior executive in the watch industry with a few remarks about the watches the attendees are wearing. The fact that this can be included in a story is even rarer, as the watches all have to be of the same brand. As unlikely as it may seem, this is exactly what happened when Walter Volpers, IWC’s Manufacturing Director, met us. Volpers had just been promoted to the role of Manufacturing Director this year after working in product design for the company. Ruckdee Chotjinda, myself and I visited the IWC offices in Schaffhausen and were both wearing IWC watches.
Volpers demonstrated his acumen, gleaned from years of working in development at IWC when he identified Ruckdee’s watch as the Portugieser Perpetual Calendar in red gold just by the tell-tale power reserve indicator. Volpers had another nickname for my discontinued 2008 Aquatimer, one that none of us knew before: Mickey Mouse. This was because the dual crowns remind Volpers of ears. Before moving on to our conversation, we all traded watches for a while.
Volpers’ discussion was very insightful. We hope you agree. He hasn’t been as well-known for his personality as other colleagues such the charismatic CEO Christoph Grainger Herr and the longtime Creative director Christian Knoop. Volpers is a unique voice with a distinct perspective, including the process of developing new watches as well as making them wearable. He also feels a special affinity for the Ingenieur which he describes as the most difficult watch he’s ever worked on. He defends his decision to launch it with a caseback that is closed, saying that IWC cannot use a proper anti-magnetic mechanism due to various patents. In addition, he says that, since the original model had a soft steel inner case, this should be repeated.
Congratulations on your new role at IWC! How is it going?
Thank you! So, by March 1 this year, I was promoted to the position of manufacturing director, which means that I’m leading the entirety of manufacturing, including the supply chain…that’s like the purchasing department (of raw materials and the like), if you want to put it that way. It’s a big change from my previous role as product developer, where I was responsible for designing and developing new watches. My job then was to make a dream a reality. Now I have to get finished watches on the market. How many watches can I deliver? This will show me how well I’ve done my job for the last eight-years. So now I’m feeling all the problems that I had while in the development stage that needed to be corrected at the manufacturing stage. It has been an amazing journey and I think I’ve done a great job in the past [Volpers puffs himself up parodically and winks knowingly]. Currently, we still have to fight a bit (to provide everything we should), but that’s the norm (for most Swiss-made brands).
So, you didn’t discover that your previous boss in manufacturing had a lot to complain about!
Product management has given me the opportunity to look at many processes in the company. This means everything from finance and quality control to sales and marketing…that gives you great insights. Of course, when you’re calculating the margin of a product, you understand a lot about production (in terms of actually making the watches for market) already. So that’s been helping me a lot in my new role to understand very quickly what is going on. For example, I knew already some of the issues we had in supply chain management with the watch industry…You know if you’re Swiss Made, you cannot purchase abroad, otherwise you’re not Swiss Made. It’s a difficult restriction to supply. So, I knew already a little bit on the issues that we have and now I can find synergies between the old role and the new one, to maybe try to look at the development of the products a bit differently… To try to capture the growing pains you have on any product development… So, you can say, “Hey, be careful when developing a watch like this, because you can have such and such problems when you begin manufacturing.
You can use your previous experience to help you succeed in your new position. What are your favorite aspects of manufacturing?
I am an industrial engineer with an MBA so for me, I’m at home with processes. It’s like returning to my roots. It is an amazing opportunity to be able to create the machine which makes the machine. Manufacturing is the process of bringing a product into existence or finalising it. My question is: Can I empower my team to accomplish what I know needs to get done? That is the real challenge for me right now: to enable my team to grow and excel.
Is the answer to the supply-chain problem that everyone is facing to be to increase production within the company?
Yes, that is a very good question. It depends. Obviously, you must have a production strategy and, based on this strategy, you should react. You’re continuously looking at double sourcing, triple sourcing even. It is important to consider innovation, and there must be a balance between your own capabilities and those of partners. We have to determine what resources (materials, expertise) may become scarce. We have to look at what your competitors are doing. Are they buying companies that could hurt you in future?
It is basically a game that allows you to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your business. If you’re aware of a weakness, you can react accordingly. The question is: How fast do you want to react? And how fast are you able or willing to react in reality. I understand that everything in the watchmaking industry is slow. I would rather react tomorrow than three months from now! But first, you need to know when to react faster… So yeah, you need to be creative and start to think differently, and this is what brings me joy in my work…finding solutions.
Please give us an example!
If there are only five suppliers in Switzerland, and two are the best, everyone will want to do business with them. How can you obtain them? And once you get them, you need to be long-term, otherwise you’ll lose them next year, and then you will not be working with the best supplier (the implication here being that one has to decide where to invest in a supplier, and where to invest in one’s own capabilities).
In our leadership roles, we should ask ourselves what we are doing to ensure that IWC will still be around 150 years from now. We can certainly increase our capacity (in some areas) if we need to produce large quantities. We do have the manufacturing center, which can allow a lot more people working here than we’re having right now. However, our production could also decrease and demand could slow (so i’ll go back to the point I made earlier). It is important to have a production system that can be adapted quickly or relatively quickly in response to the market. That’s answering the question of how do we keep the company alive for the next 150 years.
The Ingenieur of this year, who is an engineer, must address you personally, as he or she will be addressing the actual watches and your own background.
Well, the Ingenieur means a lot to me… That is my career; that is what I am. I used to take apart everything as a child just to understand how it worked. When I got presents, I thought I needed a screwdriver to take them apart so I could see how they worked! Already at that time, I knew how it felt to reassemble something and find a screw left over…something went wrong! I wanted to understand how things worked, why they worked the way they did and why all of the screws were placed where they were.
I understood I was not a normal person for thinking in that manner. As a kid, I was curious about how the roller coaster cars didn’t fall over when they were upside down. Everyone else was more concerned with how thrilling the ride was. I was like, yeah, but I’m having fun just by looking at this machine, and figuring out how it is working. I believe that this was the start. That’s why I also love the watch industry. It’s amazing how the mechanical watches (operate) in such a small space. The physics is fascinating. Then you can wear it around your wrist. It’s just so cool.
The Ingenieur watch is definitely cool!
Do you know about the titanium piece that I mentioned? Once it’s available to employees, I’m going to get this for myself. It’s time to start fighting my colleagues! The watch is important for me because it’s the last product I worked on during the development phase, and the first I have since moving to production. My hair was already grey before I started working on the Ingenieur, so I don’t think it’s all due to the development. However, we had many internal fights on this watch. We did so many iterations, maybe 100 prototypes… We did 30 different dials to get the right one… We went back and forth between making the screws (on the bezel) functional or not, and deciding on the caseback. If you are familiar with bracelets, then the bracelet is incredible. It’s the most complex bracelet I have ever seen, and it comes in three finishes. Delivering this is a real nightmare. It’s the most complex watch I’ve worked on.
This article appeared first in WOW Autumn Issue 70
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