Posted by on March 22, 2004 - 10:50AM cet - IP :
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Watches tick differently in Glashütte
Small provincial town in eastern Germany exports fine mechanical pieces to all corners of the world

Glashütte is cosmopolitan, to be found in New York, London and Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi. Glashütte watches are sold by renowned jewelers across the globe, and Lufthansa's duty-free shops offer them to well-heeled buyers soaring above. Anyone wanting to buy one has to be prepared to fork out a four- or five-digit euro sum, or, occasionally, a six-digit amount. Glashütte, in other words, is expensive, perfect and sophisticated.
Glashütte is also a small, closed world 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, south of Dresden on a narrow, curving road. It passes through villages with names like Oberhäslich, which to German ears sounds like Upper Ugly and Elend, literally Misery, before a long descent leads down into the valley of the Müglitz and Priessnitz Rivers and a nondescript community of 2,500 with a small town hall, a church, a cemetery, a scattering of unremarkable houses and a discount store. Glashütte, it turns out, is also very plain and ordinary.
How do these two aspects fit together? Rather well, actually, for Glashütte manages to be both sophisticated and provincial and combines these two characteristics in a very profitable way, as Frank Reichel knows. The Glashütte mayor, a Christian Democrat who has lived in Glashütte for all his 61 years, acknowledges that “some envy us,“ although the surrounding Ore Mountains region is economically depressed.
But the clocks - and watches - tick differently in Glashütte. Unemployment is relatively low, at no more than 13 percent compared to the overall Saxony average of 17.5 percent, and the local watchmakers have bumped up municipal trade tax revenues from just DM65,000 in 1991 to DM4 million in 2001. That's the equivalent of EUR2 million, or $2.5 million, which works out to some $1,000 for every resident.
Glashütte owes this happy development above all to one entrepreneur: Ferdinand Adolph Lange, whose family company remains the flagship of the town's watchmaking industry.
Time and again, Walter Lange today recounts the story of how his great grandfather built up the company in the former mining village starting in 1845, eventually turning Glashütte into the center of German precision watchmaking. This perfectionist's watches have long been known as technical masterpieces, and the pocket watches he sold before World War I now cost collectors as much as a new Glashütte watch by A. Lange & Sons.
A glance at the A. Lange & Sons factory, which was rebuilt after German reunification, shows why a watch can cost as much as a luxury car - even though you can buy quartz watches for EUR10 that are actually more precise than, say, the Lange model “Langematik Perpetual.“ In platinum and with a crocodile leather wristband, it sells for EUR46,600. The fabrication of cogwheels, pinions and balance springs claims its tribute - to time. Consumers cannot just go to any upmarket jeweler and buy a particular Lange watch, except in the rare instance that the desired model is in stock. Lange watches are produced to order, and that takes time.
“We want to know seven months in advance what the customer wants,“ says Frank Wolf, the head of assembly at A. Lange & Sons and a watchmaker who knows every technical and business detail. “Our watches are very labor intensive,“ he says. Thousands of hours of labor go into some watches.
Three other watchmakers are also based in Glashütte: The Swatch subsidiary GUB, Manufaktur Mühle, and Nomos, the latter being a good example of the argument that tradition is not everything in Glashütte. After German unification, Roland Schwertner, a software consultant and photographer from Düsseldorf, convinced investors to sponsor his watchmaking venture, which he called Nomos, and his Tangente model soon became a classic of modern design. Nomos now employs nearly 50 of the 570 watchmakers working in Glashütte, and Schwertner sells his watches as far away as Japan and Taiwan.
Yet it is the A. Lange & Sons models that really make the town's reputation. Mayor Reichel also wears a Nomos, but he is saving up for a Lange 1, which might take some time: It will cost 25 times as much as the watch that now adorns his wrist.
Mar. 19

Article by: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung