Road Tripping on the Autobahn, a Unique Manufacture Visit to NOMOS Glashütte

Here’s a fun fact for fans of NOMOS Glashütte: While their timepieces are manufactured in the rustic German watchmaking town that is also home Glashütte Original and A. Lange & Söhne (among others), NOMOS’ signature minimalist looks are created in the big city of Berlin.
 

In fact, the push and pull between traditional craftsmanship and modern, urban style is a big part of what makes NOMOS so unique.

Berlin is one of the world’s great cities. It is also the home of NOMOS’ in-house design agency, Berlinblau. The studio takes its road map from the “Deutscher Werkbund”, an early 20th-century movement with a mission to combine artisanal crafts and mass production. This aesthetic predates and informed the Bauhaus school, and by extension, Berlinblau.
 

Berlinblau occupies two offices in the bohemian Kreuzberg neighborhood. The light-filled rooms of these retro-fitted spaces are where NOMOS’ design team works on the external elements of their minimalist watches.
 

The creative force behind NOMOS' sports model Ahoi talks to us about about how the team collaborated to create its latest Aqua models, which hit stores this month.
 

According to Höhnel, it is against NOMOS’ ethos to create an obvious diving watch. “Most people never take their (watches) 300m under the sea,” says Höhnel. “But they do want a watch that’s waterproof when they go swimming or take a shower or get caught in the rain.”
 

Höhnel and his team sought out to create an aesthetic that was inspired by summers spent by the water. The clean white dial, blue hands and red minute markers have a nautical feeling. And when the sun sets, markers and hands painted with glowing SuperLuminova help you tell time in the dark.
 

Even the woven fabric straps are meant to recall pool pass wristbands commonly used in Germany. At the same time these bands are light and sturdy — “just the feeling you need in a summer watch”, Höhnel says that although it seems like a simple solution, sourcing straps that met NOMOS’ specifications was difficult. “Most of the manufacturers said, ‘No, we can’t do it.’ We finally found a company in France. Which proves nothing is impossible.”
 

The Aqua series represents another upgrade. Both pieces are outfitted with NOMOS’ innovative Neomatik caliber DUW 3001. At only 3.2 millimeters in height, and thanks to the recently launched NOMOS swing system, the company’s proprietary escapement, this caliber represents a new standard for automatic watches — but more about that later.

Just as the road from Berlin starts out surrounded by concrete and passes through farmers’ fields before descending into a green and leafy valley, our two-and-a half-hour drive to the bucolic town of Glashütte also serves as bridge between different sensibilities between Berlinblau and NOMOS’ headquarters.
 

There are actually a few different buildings that house everything from distribution and manufacturing to finishing and research and development. Every NOMOS watch begins its journey here.
 

First, we visited the manufacture, witnessing each step from the tooling of tiny gears to the finishing of the tempered blue balance spring and screws and process of engraving the works with Glashütte ribbing and NOMOS’s golden perlage. Even when robotics are used for the most microscopic of jobs, these machines are still just another tool of talented craftspeople on the team.
 

It’s actually mind-blowing how much work goes into what looks like such a simple machine. It becomes even more impressive when we sit down with Head of Construction and Deputy Head of Research and Development Theodor Prenzel to talk about the birth of the DUW 6101 and the NOMOS swing system which features an escape wheel, pallet, spring and bridge, all made in-house.
 

Road trips are also about independence. In 2014, NOMOS introduced its swing system. Before then, a certain multinational corporation had a stranglehold on the supply of escapements—the heartbeat of all mechanical timepieces. To gain freedom, NOMOS invested a huge amount of effort and assets to creating their own thing.

With the DUW 6101, Prenzel and his team are taking things a little further with automatic winding, Neomatik date mechanism and bidirectional quick correction feature.
 

To adapt to these new innovations, Berlin and Glashütte also had to work out a way to keep form and function in harmony. To accommodate the streamlined design, says Prenzel, his team made the movement thin (3.6mm thick). Nearly all the parts of this movement fit in between the base and three-quarter plate—a space of only one millimeter in height.
 

To maintain the precision of the caliber, the designers allowed for a broader (41mm) watch. The DUW 6101 also features the space saving program disk — a triangle with rounded sides allows a smaller date wheel which also allows for a quicker date change time frame. All in all, says Prenzel, “It took three years.” says Prenzel.