Glashütte Original

Glashütte Original is the direct corporate descendant of the East German state watchmaking industry. When the Soviet administration expropriated Glashütte's private manufacturers after the Second World War — A. Lange & Söhne among them — it consolidated them into a single enterprise, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, which produced watches for the Eastern Bloc for four decades.

After reunification the enterprise was privatised, and in 1994 it took the name Glashütte Original. It therefore inherits both the archives and the tooling of the pre-war houses and the industrial capacity built under the GDR.

That inheritance shows in vertical integration unusual even at the high end. The company makes its own movements, and its own dials, through the Pforzheim dial manufactory it acquired in 2006 — a capability most houses buy in.

The house signatures are German: three-quarter plates, duplex swan-neck fine adjustment, hand-engraved balance cocks, and skeletonised rotors in double-G form. The Panorama Date, a large date display where both discs sit on one plane so no dividing line interrupts the numerals, is its most distinctive complication and a deliberate improvement on the standard big-date module.

The Senator, Sixties, and Seventies collections cover classical and retro-industrial ground respectively. Swatch Group acquired the company in 2000.

Glashütte Original holds 39 models, from £8,200 to £34,700. Half cost less than £12,000, and a quarter less than £10,200. 33 of 39 are automatic. 31 are stocked by more than one retailer, giving 70 offers in total. Prices are checked nightly against the retailers’ own feeds.

1951

The Glashütte manufacturers are consolidated into VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe.

1994

The privatised company takes the Glashütte Original name.

2000

Acquired by the Swatch Group.

2006

The Pforzheim dial manufactory is brought in-house.