Nomos Glashütte

Nomos Glashütte was founded in 1990, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the initiative of Roland Schwertner, a West German entrepreneur who recognized the historic opportunity offered by reunification: bringing mechanical watchmaking back to life in Glashütte, the Saxon town that before the Second World War had been one of Europe's most important watchmaking centers and that in the postwar period had remained isolated behind the Iron Curtain. The first references, including the Tangente designed by Susanne Günther, were presented in 1992 and immediately established a recognizable aesthetic language: clean lines, legible dials, slim cases, a declared inheritance from the Bauhaus design born not far away, in Dessau, in the 1920s.

Unlike many historic manufactures relaunched after reunification that ended up under the control of large Swiss watchmaking groups, Nomos chose and has maintained an independent path, remaining privately owned. This independence has also become industrial: until 2005 its watches were fitted with reworked ETA or Peseux base movements, but starting that year the company began producing its own manufacture calibers, first with the Alpha family and then, from 2014, with the development of its own escapement (the Nomos "swing system," the result of years of research with the Dresden University of Technology), integrated from 2016 into calibers under the DUW brand — short for Deutsche Uhrenwerke Glashütte, the satellite company created specifically for movement production.

Today Nomos remains one of the few German manufactures to control the entire production chain — from movements to cases, designed in-house by its own Berlin creative studio — while still being a company of modest size compared to the big Swiss names. The link to Glashütte is also a regulatory one: the use of the word "Glashütte" on the dial is protected by a German law that requires a minimum share of local manufacturing, a condition Nomos has had to prove it meets since its earliest years in order to put that name on its watches.