Wempe
Brand history
Wempe was born in 1878, when Gerhard Diedrich Wempe opened a small watch and jewellery shop in Elsfleth, Germany, with a starting capital of just 80 marks. The business moved to Oldenburg in 1894 and then expanded to Hamburg, where in 1923 the company acquired the Steinstraße building that still houses its headquarters today. It was the second generation, led by Herbert Wempe, that marked a decisive turning point: in 1938 Herbert acquired Chronometer-Werke Hamburg, founded in 1905, renaming it Chronometer-Werke Gerhard D. Wempe and starting production of marine chronometers and on-board instruments for navigation and aviation. Also in the 1930s, Herbert Wempe reached an agreement with Otto Lange, grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange, to create a chronometer training and certification institute in Glashütte: a project that the war and then divided Germany made impossible for more than six decades.
After the war Wempe consolidated its role as a jeweller and authorised retailer for the great Swiss and international haute horlogerie brands — from Rolex to Cartier, from A. Lange & Söhne to Jaeger-LeCoultre — building a network that today numbers about 34 boutiques worldwide. It was with the fourth generation, and in particular with Kim-Eva Wempe (born in 1962, the first woman to lead the company, since 2003), that Herbert Wempe's interrupted dream came back to life: in 2004-2005 the family bought and restored the former Urania Observatory in Glashütte, founding there the Wempe Glashütte i/SA manufacture, including its own chronometer certification institute, conceived as the German counterpart of the Swiss COSC.
In September 2006, in Dresden, Wempe presented its first collection of own-brand watches: just 200 pieces, divided between the Zeitmeister and Chronometerwerke lines, priced between €775 and €1,975. Since then the Glashütte manufacture has developed its own calibres (from the CW1 made with Nomos in 2006 to the CW4, the first fully in-house automatic, in 2016) and expanded the catalogue, adding the Iron Walker steel sports collection to the two original lines in 2020. Wempe thus remains a special case in the watch world: a multi-brand jeweller with more than 140 years of commercial history that, for two decades, has also been a manufacture in its own right.
