A visit to the real army knife factory of Victorinox

Yesterday we had the honour to be received at the head office of Victorinox in Ibach in Switzerland.

I am part of a programme that helps people that out people who are looking to change careers but are unemployed. We are then occupied in a company that does the same thing as any other except deliver the actual goods. Its kind of a practice company. I am in charge of Marketing and to be more specific the Online Marketing and Social Media.
In line of this practice company we sell everything the brand Victorinox is selling as well but in an internal simulated ecosystem.

Since this is a cooperation of many years we had the opportunity to receive the Grand Tour of the facilities that are normally not open to the public. Due to that I am unable to show any pictures of the actual machines that are used to assemble the knives. I can put in a few others but all in all it was a really impressive experience. There is still a lot of manual labour involved but then in combination with very high tech and self designed assembly machines. It really is a clash of old meets new. There are baskets of individual parts all over the place and it looks like a well oiled machine (literally the case in a few of them)
At the end of the tour we were given a small knife (duh) and a discount voucher which was nice but we also had the chance to put questions to the head of HR which gave some insight in the recruiting policies of a global but still local company like this.
In the end that might be worth a bit more than a free knife and a discount coupon.