Final month, I had the chance to hop on a airplane (then a practice, then a automobile) to Glashütte, Germany to spend a couple of days with the Nomos workforce on the 2024 Nomos Discussion board. The workforce introduced a number of novelties, together with the controversial Tangente 2date and the Orion and Tangente neomatik doré series, and a few extra stuff to be launched. What I used to be most trying ahead to, nonetheless, was the chance to have a look behind the scenes of the manufacture.
Now, earlier than we get to the meat and potatoes of this picture report, only a few takeaways:
1) The workforce is small. Now, that should not essentially be a shock, however Nomos has all the time mentioned that they’re the most important producer of mechanical wristwatches in Germany, by numbers produced. With that in my head, it was shocking to see particular manufacturing and meeting duties relegated to single particular person watchmakers, not groups as I might have thought. It is a testomony to the model’s watchmaking effectivity.
2) Talking of effectivity, I took word of how the workforce appeared to be very open in regards to the strategies they take to provide comparatively inexpensive watches virtually totally in-house. Pay attention to the a number of machines that change hand work in the case of extremely menial duties like inserting rubies right into a motion plate or oiling these jewels in a while within the manufacturing course of. Steps like these enable Nomos to allocate their comparatively small watchmaking workforce to the locations the place they’re most wanted.
3) Their manufacture is break up up into two components – one is the Chronometrie constructing, the place you may discover the groups in control of R&D, the in-house Swing System escapement meeting, and extra. The second is their constructing a 10-minute drive away in Schlottwitz (the official title of the city, although it belongs to Glashütte) – that is the place the muse of their in-house capabilities lie, the place they produce the elements that go into their in-house calibers.
4) Nomos watchmakers put on Nomos. All Nomos staff get a basic Tangente ref. 101 on mortgage after they begin on the firm, which then turns into theirs to maintain after the primary six months. Nevertheless, lots of the watchmakers I noticed clearly had some private Nomos collections of their very own, with a few of them sporting lesser-known restricted editions from the previous. I wasn’t in a position to seize every little thing, however I bought a couple of wrist photographs in.
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