In today’s Weekend Edition: The latest podcast with Jeff Stein; a photo report from inside Nomos Glashütte; Hermes watches have a Birkin problem; the indie that Silicon Valley can’t get enough of; a vintage Vacheron chronograph I’m still thinking about; and one U.S. auction to pay attention to this week.
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🎧 UNPOLISHED PODCAST
Sell Your Watches (with Jeff Stein)
On this week’s Unpolished Podcast: Jeff Stein.
Jeff is a collector, researcher, scholar, retired lawyer, and the proprietor of On the Dash, the resource for all things Heuer. Since 2003, he’s meticulously documented nearly 600 watches there. In 2016, he was in a Talking Watches episode on Hodinkee.
We talk about his “checklist era” of collecting and upgrading his collection; the personal Heuer grails he’s chasing that no one else is; why community grails like Chronomatics and Seafarers are strong while so many other vintage tool watches have gone soft; when Heuer was hyped; what he’d buy if he had $5,000 or $10,000; the TAG Heuer divers that kept the company alive; the $500 S/eL his daughter wears; the Breguet, Audemars Piguet, Piaget, Sinn, and other watches he also enjoys.
We close with some advice: Know when to sell your watches. “The only way I could have never sold a watch might be if I’dnever made a mistake in buying a watch,” Jeff says.
👉 Podcasts are published on Fridays. Listen wherever you get podcasts: Spotify / Apple / RSS:
Photo Report: Inside Nomos Glashütte
The first “nice watch” I ever bought for myself was a Nomos Tangente. I wanted something to wear for my wedding, and Nomos looked cool. The design felt familiar in that 2010s millennial-minimalism sort of way, without the vapidness.
Nomos Glashütte says it makes 95% of its own movements. You don’t get to that by polishing a few bridges, so when I visited Glashütte, Germany, last year, I was excited to see what that actually looks like.
Nomos has about 300 employees, most of whom work across three buildings in Saxony: (1) manufacturing; (2) watchmaking; and (3) admin.1 Its in-house production breaks down neatly across the two facilities:
Manufacturing in Schlottwitz
About 10 minutes outside Glashütte in rural Saxony, where Nomos makes the raw components for its movements
Watchmaking in Glashütte
In the Chronometrie building on a hilltop above Glashütte, where watchmakers assemble and test movements
This division is a useful way to think about what a watch company is. I’ve visited many “workshops,” from the Vallée de Joux to Old Town Geneva to Chicago, and these can more or less replicate (2), the watchmaking in Glashütte. Each workshop has its own flair—perhaps an emphasis on high-end finishing or perfect anglage, but the bones are there.
There are far fewer factories manufacturing their own parts. This is typically reserved for the outskirts of Geneva, or industrial towns like La Chaux-de-Fonds or Bienne, where all those CNC machines aren’t a nuisance to the rest of us quietly minding our own business.
What Nomos outsources: Case, dial, hands, strap, buckles (i.e., the habillage, or exterior components).
The manufacturing in (1) is certainly less sexy. It turns raw steel or brass into tiny components. But turn a few knobs, and you can see how they might just as well be making medical supplies or self-driving somethings.
Walk around both Nomos facilities, and it takes fewer people to do the manufacturing. More machines, more robots, less to romanticize. This isn’t the way Ferdinand A. Lange was doing it in this valley in 1845. There aren’t any white coats hunched over a watchmaker’s bench turning screws or assembling movements.
Nomos is impressive because it did the hard part, the part that’s not all sexy designs and stone dials. It’s why Nomos, founded in 1990, didn’t introduce its own in-house Alpha movement until 2005, and its own Swing System escapement until 2015. Today, Nomos produces about 20,000 watches per year.2
While visiting Saxony, I toured both (1) the manufacturing site in Schlottwitz and (2) the watchmaking in Glashütte on a misty, gray fall day.
50+ photos and thoughts on what it means to be “independent” in the full Photo Report:
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The Roundup
Hermès watchmaking’s Birkin problem; the indie Silicon Valley can’t get enough of; one U.S. auction to pay attention to this week; maybe the best vintage watch I’ve seen this year
