WORLDTEMPUS – 15 June 2010
David Chokron
Nomos is a discrete brand from Glashütte, the legendary watchmaking city in Saxony located between Dresden and the Czech border. It mainly caters to its home market, where it is known for strikingly lean designs and exceptional value for money—so much so that brand doesn't even have a sales force to visit its many German retailers, even though they generate 80 percent of its business. Watch shops come to Nomos, and so do its Swiss retailers located mainly in the German-speaking part of the confederation.
Saxon Mechanical Design
The fact is that Nomos is a different kind of brand. Deeply rooted in the principles of Werkbund, a pre-Bauhaus design movement, it believes in form and function working intimately in sobriety. Most of its models are priced under 2,500 Swiss francs, forming an almost unbeatable entry-level range of mechanical watches—particularly since Nomos is a true manufacture. In 1992, after German reunification, Roland Schwertner arrived in the cradle of German watchmaking. The company first used ETA Peseux movements before flying solo in the early years of the new millennium with Caliber Alpha, a small hand-wound caliber. Designed and decorated according to the basic principles of Saxon watchmaking, it contains a three-quarter plate, Glashütte ribbing, and sunburst decoration. Later variations contain a date and a power reserve, and Caliber Epsilon: a slightly bigger and automatic version. In addition to its own watches, Nomos offers a ring-shaped portable sundial and supplies the Wempe watch brand with 80-hour movements and even a tourbillon.
Limited Automation
Nestled inside Glashütte's old train station, Nomos has installed a machining and turning workshop. It manufactures most of the components needed to make close to 20,000 movements a year, making it self-sufficient. Some external parts including escapements and cases, hands, and dials are sourced in Switzerland. What the company calls its “chronometrie” houses the manpower and machines to operate on a semi-automated basis while preserving the value of the movements. An automatic oiling machine, a hand-setting machine, and sequential assembly benches allow a streamlined assembly process for Nomos' seven calibers.
Openings
For the first time, Nomos has launched a significant complication: an automatic worldtimer, based on the automatic caliber and called Xi. Typical for Nomos, however, the Weltzeit hasn't been launched for good. It is undergoing a full scale boot camp: 300 testers will be wearing the watches for 90 days, after which they will fill out forms with the goal of improving them. The testers will then choose between a refund and keeping the watch, which can be considered near prototype. Should the customer choose to keep the tested watch, it will be fully refurbished and outfitted with any improvements before it moves into its new home for good.
Nomos offers two versions: the GMT model in the brand's historical Tangomat case (around 3,400 Swiss francs). The second version—the Weltzeit—is housed in the latest and most sophisticated case christened Zürich (close to 4,300 Swiss francs). These are, of course, perfectly reasonable prices for a manufactured complication of this quality.
