He was born to Jacques Joseph Simonis and Marie-Agnès-Dieudonnée de Franquinet in 1769.
[1] His family owned the textile firm Simonis et Biolley, after a merger resulting when his sister Marie Anne Simonis married Jean-François Biolley.
[2] Verviers and its surroundings produced high-quality textiles in the 17th and 18th centuries, by the end of which cottage industry gradually gave way to work in localized manufactories.
In 1799, Iwan Simonis arranged to pay British entrepreneur William Cockerill to construct spinning machines and other textile-production devices in a factory in Verviers, the first step towards machine factories taken in the region.
After the machines proved effective, in 1801, Simonis was recognized by the firm with a bonus of 20,000 francs.