Lang & Heyne is a tiny watchmaker from Dresden that has been building some of the most obsessively hand-finished watches in Germany since 2001. The brand was founded by two watchmakers, Marco Lang and Mirko Heyne, with a deliberately old-fashioned pitch: wristwatches informed by the craft of 18th-century Saxon court watchmakers like Johann Heinrich Seyffert. Today the company sits inside the Tempus Arte Group alongside STOWA, employs about 35 people, makes roughly 150 watches a year, and, in a detail worth knowing before anything else, neither founder is still there.
Lang & Heyne logo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Two friends and an old idea
In 2001, Marco Lang and Mirko Heyne opened a workshop in Dresden with the goal of making contemporary wristwatches rooted in Saxony’s watchmaking past rather than in whatever the Swiss were doing that year. They named their watches after Saxon rulers from the House of Wettin, the same figures parading across the Fürstenzug, the 102-meter porcelain mural in central Dresden that is the largest porcelain artwork in the world. The idea was not to copy pocket watches from 1800 but to rethink them, which is the kind of ambition that is either charming or delusional depending on the execution. Heyne left the company in 2002 and later joined Nomos Glashütte, and the split was apparently friendly enough that the name stayed as it was.
Marco Lang
Marco Lang, from a family of watchmakers, kept going alone and made the brand what it is. He became a member of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants in 2005 and developed nine different in-house calibres over his time running the company. His signature contribution was building Lang & Heyne’s manufacturing depth from almost nothing: in 2013 he helped create Uhren-Werke-Dresden (UWD) as a subsidiary movement and component manufacturer, part of an effort to rebuild Saxony’s nearly vanished watch-component industry. Lang headed the manufacture until 2018 and left in 2019 to start a new watchmaking workshop under his own name. The transition was supported by Jens Schneider, a former consultant who became director of development.
The Tempus Arte era
Lang sold a majority stake in the company to Prof. Dr. Ulrich L. Rohde, a wealthy watch enthusiast whom Phillips described as the son of one of the co-founders of Rohde & Schwarz. In 2013, Lang and Rohde, together with two other shareholders, founded the Tempus Arte Group, with Lang contributing the Lang & Heyne manufacture and UWD set up as the group’s movement arm. Tempus Arte later added STOWA to the portfolio (acquired in 2021), giving the group a high-end artisan brand, a volume seller, and an in-house movement maker under one roof. Production grew slowly and deliberately, from about 30 watches in 2013 to around 150 in 2024, and in 2018 the company moved from Dresden to the renovated historic Todenmühle in Radeberg, with four million euros invested in the expansion. Since July 1, 2025, the group has been led by CEO Dr.-Ing. Daniel T. Roy together with Alexander Gutierrez Diaz.
The watches
The brand’s foundation stone is Calibre I, a hand-wound in-house movement with 151 parts, a stately 18,000 vibrations per hour, a 46-hour power reserve, and eccentric seconds at six. It shows off the house style: a three-quarter plate, a hand-engraved balance cock with swan-neck regulator, black polishing, blued screws, sunburst-brushed winding wheels, and grained baseplates. The brand claims well over 90 percent of its movement manufacturing is vertically integrated, which, if true, is remarkable for a 35-person operation. The Friedrich III was the watch that carried Calibre I first, and the Friedrich August I still uses it today, offered in steel, rose gold, or platinum with a double-sunk enamel dial. The Georg is named for Georg the Bearded (1471-1539) and has a fully open caseback with a narrow frame and cantilevered steel bridges, so you can see the whole gear train from barrel to balance. Other models include the Moritz, the Konrad, the Anton, a rectangular watch with a tourbillon, and the Hektor, a stainless steel integrated-bracelet sports watch with a UWD calibre, whose Edition II pairs German silver with a petticoat motif. The Hektor is the one watch in the lineup that acknowledges it is not 1790 anymore.
The Fürstenzug (Procession of Princes) mural in Dresden, whose House of Wettin rulers give Lang & Heyne’s models their names. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Why it matters
Lang & Heyne is one of the few genuinely independent-minded manufacturers where the finishing is real craft rather than marketing copy: hand engraving, black polishing, and enamel dials at a scale of 150 watches a year. But go in with open eyes. Both namesakes are gone, one to Nomos and the other to his own new workshop, so the brand you are buying is a corporate-owned continuation (a well-funded one, but a continuation). Almost nobody has heard of it, the watches cost tens of thousands of pounds, the design language is resolutely conservative, and buying one means betting on a small company’s service infrastructure for the next few decades. That is a lot of caveats. It is also what makes the watches interesting: they exist because a handful of people in Saxony insisted on making them this way, not because a focus group asked for them.
Official site: lang-und-heyne.de
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