Teddy Baldassarre
IWC Portugieser Buyer's Guide
IWC is a Swiss watch company, founded by an American, whose history is closely tied with Germany. But one of its most enduringly popular timepiece families is called the Portugieser, and it’s likely that lots of enthusiasts and would-be owners don’t even know why - or that the watch itself preceded that now-familiar name by many decades. What's indisputable is the Portugieser's key role in IWC's history and its impact on watchmaking - from its humble origins as a market-specific experiment to its modern incarnation as a major pillar of IWC's collection. 1939: Two Portuguese Businessmen Walk Into a Watch Factory… Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Actually, don’t bother, because I’ll be retelling the origin story of the IWC Portugieser anyway, for those who aren’t familiar with it. Like much of the rest of the world, in the throes of the Great Depression and under the gathering storm clouds of a second World War, the Swiss watch industry was facing rough economic times in the 1930s. The International Watch Company, based in Schaffhausen in Switzerland’s German-speaking north, dealt with the challenges in a number of practical ways. One was by making wristwatches that could be worn by military pilots for the aerial combat that was looking increasingly inevitable. (I tell that story in much more detail here.) Another was by expanding its reach to international markets such as Portugal. Thus it came to be that two gentlemen by the name of Antonio...
