Glashütte Original

The story of Glashütte Original begins in 1845, when watchmaker Ferdinand Adolph Lange settled in the small town of Glashütte, in the Ore Mountains of Saxony, not far from Dresden. With the help of a loan granted by the Kingdom of Saxony, Lange began training local residents who would go on to become independent watchmakers, laying the foundations of a watchmaking district that within a few decades achieved international fame for the precision of its output. In 1878 the German School of Watchmaking of Glashütte was founded, established to pass on the craft knowledge accumulated in the town — the same tradition from which, along a parallel path, the A. Lange & Söhne brand also descends.

The two world wars hit the Saxon watch industry hard, and in the postwar period, under the East German regime, the town's many historic manufactures were nationalized and, in 1951, merged into a single state-owned company. Only after German reunification could the local watchmaking tradition be reconstituted as a private enterprise: on October 16, 1990, Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH was founded, the legal successor to the pre-existing Saxon companies, out of which the modern Glashütte Original brand took shape.

In 2000 Glashütte Original joined the Swatch Group, the Swiss watchmaking group that supported its international expansion, bringing the brand to be distributed today in over 40 countries. Despite being part of a large group, the manufacture has maintained a high degree of vertical production integration, making most of its caliber components in-house and thus claiming a direct continuity with the watchmaking craft born in the town in 1845.