1972 vintage IWC Yacht Club 811AD, automatic movement and with beads of rise GF stell band.

For a collector, having at least one of these vintage IWC Yacht Club is a must. It is one of the last representative of the golden age of mechanical wrist watches right before the quartz crisis. While the IWC Yacht Club was probably one of the best selling IWC models in the pre-quartz history of IWC, everything afterwards was more or less a commercial disaster be it the other club watches (Polo Club, Golf Club) or the legendary Ingenieur SL 1832.

One of my favorite vintage brands and one which I also feel is consistently undervalued is the IWC. Back in the day, every IWC watch had an in-house movement and their manual wind and automatic calibers were some of the best, most reliable and accurate machines on the market. With their bespoke Pelleton winding system, which was developed bythe marques famed technical directorAlbert Pelleton in the early 1950s, IWC offered a solid alternative, if not also an implicit challenge, to Rolexs longtime dominance of full rotor automatictechnology. IWC continued to develop their 85x auto calibers for nearly two decadesuntil they reached what many experts consider the pinnacle with their legendary 8541B movement.

International Watch Co., also known as IWC, is a luxury Swiss watch manufacturer located in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and founded by American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones in 1868.

In 1991 IWC director Gnter Blmlein founded the LMH Group with its headquarters in Schaffhausen. With a 100% stake in IWC, 60% in Jaeger-LeCoultre and 90% in the Saxony-based watchmaking company of A. Lange & Shone, the Group employed some 1440 persons.

In July 2000, LMH was acquired by Richemont, a Zug-based luxury goods group, for CHF 2.8 bn. Despite the takeover by Richemont, IWC was guaranteed that it would continue to be managed by the same executives from the LMH Group.