Exclusive Video: Leica’s Unique Lens on Watchmaking

Watchonista recently traveled to Wetzlar, Germany, and learned that, while its 150-plus years of expertise in photography, optics, design, and production gave it a head start when it began making fine timepieces in 2015, Leica’s heritage is more emotionally resonant than directly influential.

Fun Fact: Leica’s founder, Ernst Leitz, apprenticed in Switzerland to become a watchmaker before he moved into the world of precision optics (telescopes and microscopes).

Certainly, the shared production necessities of precision machinery and equipment and a controlled environment draw a line between cameras and timepieces, but our visit presented a different, more nuanced perspective.

“The ultimate goal is to find the right balance,” Henrik Ekdahl, Managing Director of Leica’s watch and luxury division, Ernst Leitz Werkstätten, told us, “The balance between the manufacture, hand-wound movement and other watches that get a lot of inspiration from the world of cameras, without being ‘gadgets.’”

The signature Leica elements that make their creations so desirable for photographers, like perfect, substantial hand-feel and detailed, function-driven materials and finishing that cross into luxury, are abundantly apparent in its watch collections.

The classic 41mm ZM1 and ZM2 timepieces, with their distinctive “lens-like” small seconds indications, both utilize hand-wound manufacture calibers based on movements from Germany’s Lehmann Präzision. Meanwhile, the visually edgy ZM11 and ZM12 models use in-house automatic calibers based on movements from Swiss movement maker Chronode.