HANNES PANTLI

IWC

Hannes Pantli is a living legend at iWC Schaffhausen. Starting in 1974, his pioneering sales trips to Dubai, Oman, Abu Dhabi and Qatar brought the great Swiss luxury watch manufacturer a lucrative new export market and helped save it from going bankrupt, writes Joezer Mandagi

“My biggest personal achievement is how I saved the company from bankruptcy in the 1970s,” says Hannes A. Pantli, official spokesman for IWC Schaffhausen and a long-time member of the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer’s board of directors. The remark is made with tongue only slightly in cheek, for Pantli did indeed play a heroic part in turning things around for IWC after the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s had devastated Switzerland’s mechanical watch industry.

During a fascinating, enlightening and stirring interview with Prestige at the Pilot’s Watches Exhibition at the Pavilion Kuala Lumpur in July, Pantli recalled how the 70s was a rough time for Switzerland’s mechanical watch producers. The Quartz Crisis had begun, while European currencies were pegged to the US dollar and gold prices were skyrocketing.

“In a very short time, our watches tripled in price and so our exports almost came to a stop,” Pantli recalls. “Also, we had to reduce our number of watchmakers from 350 to 150. We literally didn’t know if we would survive.

“One day, the CFO called me and said: ‘Listen, Hannes. If by the 20th of this month you don’t bring in 100,000 francs in cash, we close the factory.” To prevent that from happening, Pantli looked to a new market: the Middle East. In 1974, he made his way to Dubai.

“Nobody knew where Dubai was back then. It was still called the Pirate’s Coast at the time. The Sultanate of Oman was also still unknown. So, I started there, and I built up the market. The Sultan of Oman became one of our biggest customers, along with the sheikhs of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. And it was this that saved the company.”

While he was instrumental in ensuring that IWC would weather the quartz crisis that shook Switzerland’s watch industry to its core, he also plays a huge part in safeguarding the brand’s legacy - and he does so as a collector. Pantli has an unrivalled collection of hundreds of IWC watches. Or rather, he had such a collection. Now, more than 300 of those have been sold back to the brand. They reside in the IWC Museum, with some eventually touring the world.

“I had been working for about two to three months at the factory when an elderly lady came with a pocket watch and said that her grandfather bought it from a Russian immigrant who came to Switzerland after the revolution,” Pantli says of the first IWC watch he ever bought.

“She said: ‘I have this watch from my grandfather. I don’t know what to do with a pocket watch. But it is a really beautiful watch, I would like to sell it.’ That’s the first one I bought, and I sold her a wristwatch. That’s really when the collecting started.”

Collecting watches was a different game then. Today, you can easily find vintage pieces online. Back then, it was a much more direct experience, and a lot depended on luck. “In New York at 47th street there were a lot of antiques dealers,” Pantli recalls. “I saw an IWC in a showcase, so I went into the store. But it was a fake.

“The man got really angry and he said: ‘Young man, I was selling IWC watches before you were born!’ But then I told him what I did and we became friends. Whenever he or the other shops found an interesting IWC, they kept it for me until I returned to New York. I found some really interesting pieces. Some of them are now in the museum.”

Despite his unparalleled experience in finding and tracking down rare IWC watches, including an ultra-rare World War II-era Kriegsmarine pocket watch and an 1884 model of which only two were made, with one remaining unknown and the other leading Pantli on an adventure to Sicily - he is still excited whenever novelties are introduced.

This is particularly true whenever IWC rolls out new and innovative materials, such as the brand’s proprietary alloy known as Ceratanium. “This is very interesting especially when we find new solutions, new ways of producing,” he elaborates. “Because when you look at watchmaking, it is a very, very old trade. The mechanics of watches are still basically the same.”

More importantly, he is also confident that the future of watchmaking is in good hands. “We have 24 apprentices in Schaffhausen, at the factory, learning the trade of watchmaker,” Pantli enthuses. “It takes four years to become a complete watchmaker and it has become a very respectable job again.”

And those new watchmakers will then design, tinker and create for a brand whose legacy has been preserved, in more ways than one, by Hannes Pantli.