NOMOS Glashütte was founded in January 1990, two months after the Berlin Wall came down, by Roland Schwertner, an IT expert and fashion photographer from Düsseldorf. He was not a watchmaker. Production started in 1992 in a rented room above a snack bar (the legendary “Heidi’s Imbiss”) with three local watchmakers assembling four designs drawn up by Susanne Günther. Those first four models, Tangente, Orion, Ludwig, and Tetra, are still the core of the catalog, and the brand is now one of the most recognizable names in independent watchmaking.
The Tangente neomatik 41 Update. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A photographer walks into a watch town
The story starts with a great-aunt. Schwertner was visiting his great-aunt in Glashütte, a small Saxon town that had been a watchmaking center since Ferdinand Adolph Lange set up there in 1845, then spent the war and the East German decades making watches for the state combine. Shortly after reunification, Schwertner saw a town full of highly skilled watchmakers with almost nothing to do and decided to start a watch company. His first designs were drawn by Susanne Günther in a clean, spare style influenced by early twentieth century German modernism. The name “Nomos” comes from the Greek word for law or rule. It is worth knowing there was already a Nomos: the Nomos-Uhr-Gesellschaft of 1906, a Swiss importer that got sued by A. Lange & Söhne for borrowing the Glashütte name and went out of business in 1910. The two companies share nothing but the name.
Still independent, still in Glashütte
NOMOS Glashütte is an owner-managed family company, which in 2026 is genuinely rare. No conglomerate bought it. The managing partner and CEO is Uwe Ahrendt, an engineer who runs the technical side, while Schwertner remains involved in the business he started. The company employs around 300 people, most of them in Glashütte, across three sites, including its headquarters in the town’s old train station. Administration sits in the former Glashütte station building, which is a nice piece of symbolism for a company that likes to talk about journeys. There are also offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Como. Annual production is around 20,000 watches, which means NOMOS is not the tiny outsider it was in the nineties. It is a mid-sized manufacture with a global footprint, sold in more than 50 countries.
The slow road to “in-house”
Here is the honest part. For the first thirteen years, NOMOS watches ran on Swiss movements: the hand-wound Peseux 7001, reworked in Glashütte. The first NOMOS-designed caliber, the hand-wound Alpha, arrived in 2005, and the first automatic, the Tangomat with the in-house Xi movement, followed the same summer. The real milestone came in 2014 with the NOMOS Swing System, an escapement (balance wheel, hairspring, and lever, the regulating heart of the movement) built in-house in partnership with the Technical University of Dresden. Very few brands at any price make their own escapements. Then in 2015 came the neomatik series, starting with caliber DUW 3001, an automatic movement just 3.2 millimeters thick, followed by the DUW 6101 with a date display on the dial’s outer edge. One thing worth knowing: the Glashütte name is legally protected. To use it, at least 50 percent of a caliber’s value must be made in Glashütte. NOMOS says its figure is up to 95 percent. The early Swiss-movement years do not disqualify any of that, but they explain why the brand’s independence story reads like a slow climb rather than a founding legend.
The Ludwig, one of the four original 1992 models, with its Roman numerals. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The watches, in order of appearance
Tangente (1992) is the one. Thin case, wire lugs, large Arabic numerals, a dial that has barely changed in over thirty years, and for years the entry point to the brand. Orion (1992) softened the same idea with curved lugs and mostly index markers. Ludwig (1992) went classical with Roman numerals. Tetra (1992) was the square one. Club (2007) was the casual, sturdier sibling with a bolder dial layout. Zürich (2009) added a world-time complication. Lambda and Lux (2013) were the first gold models, proving NOMOS could do high-end finishing. Ahoi (2013) was the sporty one, water-resistant to 20 atmospheres, which for a dress-watch company was a genuine stretch. Metro (2014), designed by Berlin industrial designer Mark Braun, broke the mold with an off-center layout, a mint power-reserve indicator, and a domed crystal; it won a shelf of design awards. The neomatik automatics from 2015 onward put the slim DUW movements into the classic models, and Autobahn (2018) pushed the design language into louder, more colorful territory. Every one of these watches is still recognizably a NOMOS at a glance, which is the point.
Caliber DUW 6101, the in-house neomatik date movement, with its own escapement. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Where it stands now
NOMOS is in a good spot, and it is worth being honest about what that means. The watches are still mechanical, still designed in Berlin, still built in Glashütte, and still independent, which puts them in very select company. The design is consistently excellent, and the movement work is real: an in-house escapement and ultra-thin automatics at these prices remain unusual. But the prices have crept up. The basic hand-wound Tangente now retails around $2,300, and the neomatik automatics sit in the $3,000 to $4,000 range, so the “affordable German watch” framing from a decade ago needs updating. The Bauhaus label gets repeated in every article about the brand (this one included), and it is fair to say the connection is more about design vocabulary than history: Bauhaus was in Weimar and Dessau, never in Glashütte. And the long wire lugs that make NOMOS watches look so good also make them wear larger than their stated diameters, so try one on before committing. None of this is a reason to avoid the brand. It is just the difference between the legend and the company.
Why it matters
NOMOS showed that a watch company could be born in 1990, with no heritage to lean on, and earn its credibility the hard way: by designing well and learning to make its own movements over thirty years. It proved there was room for a German brand that was not trying to out-Swiss the Swiss, and it gave a generation of collectors their first genuinely good mechanical watch. That is a real contribution, and the watches on the wrist back it up.
Official site: nomos-glashuette.com
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