NOMOS Glashütte: In House Or Nothing

There is a machine in Schlottwitz, the area of Glashütte where NOMOS has its parts production site, that works for three days at a stretch without anyone touching it.

People who work near it have a nickname for it. Employee of the month, every month. You load a container with the jobs it needs to do, walk away, and the machine reads its own instructions and gets on with milling the plates and bridges and small steel springs that hold a watch movement together. It does not eat. It does not sleep. You can set it going on a Friday afternoon and find it on Monday morning still working, having turned a stack of metal into parts while the building was dark and empty.

This machine does not exactly fit the picture most people carry of German watchmaking. We are trained to imagine the watchmaker. The white coat, the wooden bench, the loupe over one eye, the silence. That picture is real and it exists, and I will get to it. But the watch I'm thinking of started somewhere less romantic than that, but no less important. It started as a three-metre bar of steel fed into a machine in a village some watch buyers have never heard of, and there was no one in the room.

Here is why that machine matters, and why I want to start with it rather than with the watchmaker.

Most watch brands do not make their own watches.

I know how that sounds. They have factories. They have watchmakers. They have videos of clean rooms and tweezers and a man in a loupe breathing carefully over a movement. But underneath all of that, in the part of the watch that actually matters most, the great majority of the industry is buying the same component from the same place. The escapement. The small assembly of parts that controls how fast a mechanical watch is allowed to run. For decades, most of the escapements in most of the watches in the world have traced back to a single supplier in Switzerland, and the brands that buy from it would rather you did not think about that too hard.

NOMOS is one of the few that does not buy. The machine in Schlottwitz running through the empty weekend is the visible end of that decision. The invisible end is an escapement the company spent seven years and millions of euros to build, so that it would never again have to ask anyone's permission to make a watch. That single fact reflects the whole brand, and once you understand what it cost them, not just in money, you understand everything else about the company. The price discipline. The refusal to behave like a luxury house. It all comes from one decision, made by a small company in a small town, to do the hardest thing in watchmaking themselves rather than depend on anyone for it.

This is a piece about what that decision cost and what it bought. It is, I think, the most interesting story in German watchmaking, and it's dramatically undertold, because telling it straight means starting with the uncomfortable fact that the rest of the industry would prefer to leave alone.

A mechanical watch runs on a coiled spring. Wind the spring, it wants to unwind, and that unwinding is the energy that drives the hands. The problem is that a spring left to itself unwinds all at once, in a fraction of a second. So you need something that lets the energy out in tiny, evenly spaced increments, thousands of times an hour, for as long as the watch runs. That something is the escapement. The balance wheel swinging back and forth, the balance spring breathing it in and out, the escape wheel and the pallet ticking the energy free one beat at a time. It is the part that turns a wound spring into a timekeeper. Everything else in the watch is in service of it.

It is also the hardest part to make. The components are smaller than almost anything else in the movement, the tolerances are unforgiving, and getting them to work together reliably took the watch industry the better part of two centuries to figure out. The know-how and the machinery sit behind a wall that a small brand cannot climb. So small brands do not try. They buy the escapement, the way you buy flour rather than growing the wheat, and they build the rest of the watch around it.

There is nothing shameful in this. A watch built on bought parts can be excellent, finished beautifully, sold honestly. But it does mean something. If the heart of your watch comes from a supplier, then the supplier sets your quality and your quantity. You can ask for more. You cannot make more. You are independent right up until the moment the supplier says no, and then you find out exactly how independent you were.

NOMOS decided that was not independence at all. To understand why a small company would spend years and a fortune fixing a problem most brands are content to live with, you have to know where NOMOS started, and how badly the question of independence once stung.

The valley itself was born from a bailout.

Glashütte sits in the Ore Mountains of Saxony, in the east of Germany, about forty minutes south of Dresden. In the 1840s it was a dying mining town with nothing left to mine. A watchmaker named Ferdinand Adolph Lange wrote to the Saxon government with a plan to build an entire industry from scratch in this poor place, and in 1845 the state granted him a loan to do it. He arrived with fifteen apprentices and taught former miners and farmers to make watches by hand.

The detail I love, the one that makes Glashütte different from every other watch town, is what Lange did with those apprentices once they were good. He encouraged them to leave and start their own small supplier firms. He did not hoard the knowledge. He seeded it across the valley on purpose, until the whole town was a web of workshops each making one part well. Glashütte was an in-house ecosystem before the phrase existed. The name on the dial has meant something ever since, and it is now protected by German law the way Champagne is protected: a watch can only carry "Glashütte" if at least half its value is made there. You cannot buy your way into the word.

NOMOS arrived late, and it arrived under suspicion.

NOMOS was founded in 1990, in the months after the Berlin Wall came down, in a reunified Germany where the old eastern watchmaking had collapsed. It made clean, well-designed watches at honest prices, and in its early years it did what most small brands do. It used Swiss movements.

In a town whose entire worth is staked on the word "Glashütte," that was a problem. NOMOS was called out for it. A lawyer went after the company on behalf of the local tradition, arguing, in effect, that a watch with a Swiss heart had no business wearing the name of a German town. It is hard to imagine a more wounding accusation for a young company that wanted, more than anything, to belong to the place it was named after. You are not really one of us. Your watches are not really from here.

What NOMOS did next is why we love them so much. It could have fought the accusation in public and kept buying Swiss parts. Instead it set out, slowly and at great cost, to make the accusation impossible. It started building its own movements. It poured money into machinery and people. It worked its way up the watch, part by part, until there was almost nothing left to buy in. The company decided it would not just meet the standard of the valley. It would exceed it so far that no one could ever question it again.

Here is the numbers I haven’t mentioned. Seven years of development. Eleven point four million euros. One component.

The hardest part of the watch, the escapement, was the last wall to climb, and NOMOS climbed it with help from the technical university in Dresden and the Fraunhofer Institute. That alone tells you the seriousness of it. This was not a design exercise handed to a styling team. It was real engineering, academic physicists and years of failure, aimed at a problem the rest of the industry had agreed to leave to the companies that already owned it. In 2014 NOMOS put the result into series production and called it the Swing System. The CEO, Uwe Ahrendt, described it as the company's own moon landing.

It is kind of an inflated phrase, “it’s own moon landing”, a brand reaches for when it wants you to be impressed. But with NOMOS, it kind of works. Eleven point four million euros is loose change to a large luxury group. To a company the size of NOMOS, making a modest number of watches a year at modest prices, it was the kind of bet that could have ended the company if it had failed. They spent it anyway, over seven years, to stop depending on a supplier for the one part that matters most. Set against the size of the gamble, "moon landing" is not hyperbole. It might be underselling it.

And the investment bought more than independence. As part of the underlying research, the team reworked the geometry of the gear teeth, and the movement ended up transmitting power far more efficiently than before. The figure NOMOS cites is 94.6 percent power transfer in its DUW 3001 movement, against a more typical 80 to 85 percent before the work. That efficiency is why NOMOS could then build an automatic movement just 3.2 millimetres thick, thinner than many watches that wind by hand. The independence and the engineering were not two projects. They were one. You could not have the thin automatic without the escapement research, and you could not justify the escapement research without the independence it bought.

NOMOS makes its own calibres now, thirteen of them, hand-wound and automatic, simple and complicated, the entire range running on movements the company designed and built itself. When you design your own movements, the clever solutions you find along the way belong to you. NOMOS holds patents on its date mechanisms and on its power reserve indicator.

How little NOMOS buys in is almost comic when you hear it said plainly. Up to 95 percent of each calibre is made on site in Glashütte. What does the company purchase from outside? Ahrendt's own answer: the rubies used as bearings, and tiny oil reservoirs. Everything else, they make.

Now we can go back to the watchmaker, because the most interesting thing about NOMOS is not that it is high-tech, and not that it is hand-craft. It is that the two sit at the same bench doing the same job.

The parts made in Schlottwitz travel along the road to the NOMOS Chronometry in Glashütte, where the milling and the wire erosion give way to people. Watchmakers in white coats at wooden benches, near silence, the occasional tick of a movement waking up. Then you notice the machines tucked in among them. At each bench, dozens of movements wait in a dust-protected drawer and arrive in front of the watchmaker on a small conveyor. The machine helps place the tiny jewels and helps oil them. The person does the work that needs a person. The decoration is done with hand-operated tools, and then the movements are assembled and adjusted by hand, in a tradition the town has kept for more than 175 years.

It would be cheaper to commit to one extreme. Full automation, or full hand-work at triple the price. NOMOS does both, deliberately, because the machine is better at the parts that demand the same motion ten thousand times without a tremor, and the human is better at the parts that need judgement. The watch is where the two finally meet.

There is a part of the process where the machines step back almost entirely: the assembly of the Swing System itself, the marrying of the escapement to the movement. NOMOS says the knowledge of how to do this does not exist out in the world. You cannot hire it. It has to be taught inside the company, from the people who know to the people who will know next. That is the deepest meaning of building your own escapement. It is not that you own a machine. It is that you own a kind of knowledge that lives nowhere else, and the only place to learn it is the room where it happens.

Here is the part of the story I cannot stop thinking about.

The lawyer who went after NOMOS three decades ago, the one who argued the young company had no right to the Glashütte name, is a man named Wolfgang Straub. NOMOS spent the years after that accusation making itself unimpeachably German, building its movements, building its escapement, raising its in-house rate past the point of any reasonable doubt. And somewhere along the way, the man who once tried to keep NOMOS out joined them. For the last twenty years Straub has worked with NOMOS on the opposite goal, the campaign to turn the old unwritten Glashütte rule into an actual law. A couple of years ago, they won. The German parliament made "Glashütte" legally enforceable, with NOMOS at the front of the fight. It is the kind of turn you could not put in fiction without an editor calling it too neat.

I have gone back and forth on whether all of this was wise, building up your own production, and I would rather be honest about that than pretend the answer is obvious.

Doing everything yourself is the hardest and most expensive way to make a watch. A single new movement can take a year and a half from prototype to production. The escapement took up millions and decades from a small indie company. There are wonderful watches built on shared movements, and the people who buy them are not being fooled. Vertical integration is not a virtue in itself. Sometimes it is just expensive pride dressed up as principle, and the watch world is far too quick to clap for the principle without counting the cost.

So in the lean years, when the money was going out the door toward an escapement that might never have worked, it must have looked like stubbornness from the inside. It is only now, with the watch finished and ticking, that everyone gets to call it vision. Stubbornness and vision are the same trait, photographed before and after the result is known.

But here is what settles it for me. What NOMOS bought with all that money and time was not an escapement. It was control. They set their own quality, because they make their own parts. They set their own volume, because no supplier rations them. They own their own ideas, because the patents are theirs. They own their own future, because the knowledge of how to make the hardest part of a watch lives in their building and not in someone else's. A company that was once told it did not belong spent everything it could afford to make sure no one could ever say that again. Put that way, eleven point four million euros stops looking like pride and starts looking like the price of staying your own.

There is another dividend too, the one NOMOS rarely brags about, because bragging would spoil it. Consider that NOMOS makes thousands of watches a year, almost entirely in-house, with its own escapement and its own patents and the protected name on the dial, and asks for a fraction of the money. That gap is what doing it all yourself actually pays out. You take the cost out of the steps where a machine beats a person, you spend it back on the steps where a person beats a machine, and the difference goes to the buyer instead of to a middleman. It is not a discount. It is what is left when nobody in the chain is taking a cut they did not earn.

That is the case for in-house or nothing. Not that it is cheap, because it is the opposite. Not that it is easy, because it is the hardest road there is. It is that when you make everything yourself, the watch on your wrist is the one object in the room that nobody outside the company had any say in. The bar of steel, the machine that runs through the weekend, the people who alone know how to make the escapement breathe, the patents, the name on the dial that the law now protects. All of it theirs, and hard-won.

The machine will be running again this weekend, the building dark and empty around it, turning steel into the beginnings of watches that nobody has had to ask anyone's permission to make. That is the point. NOMOS spent thirty years and a fortune making sure the only people who ever needed to be in the room were their own.

The videos in this article came from NOMOS’ spectacular video series Made in Glashütte that you really should check out here.

-Vuk