Glashütte valley
Glashütte is a small town in the Müglitz valley in eastern Saxony, about 25 km south of Dresden. Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded a watchmaking school and a workshop here in 1845, on a state subsidy meant to relieve the local mining poverty after the silver veins ran out. The town became the German watchmaking capital before WWII; the post-war GDR consolidated the surviving makers into VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe; reunification in 1990 reopened the trade. The modern manufactures (Lange, Glashütte Original, Nomos, Tutima, Mühle, Moritz Grossmann) sit within a two-kilometre radius of each other on the same valley floor.
Browse all 56 Glashütte valley references →
10 pins in Glashütte valley. Hover or focus a pin for the brand name; click through for the brand’s catalog page.
Brands in Glashütte valley
Founded by Ferdinand Adolph Lange to bring watchmaking to the impoverished Erzgebirge; expropriated after WWII, refounded by Walter Lange in 1990 and now the anchor of the modern Glashütte revival.
Founded 2000 in Glashütte by Bruno Söhnle, at Dresdner Straße 14 in the former Assmann house. The first mechanical watch followed in 2008 on the BS 283 and the first automatic in 2010 on the BS 175. The Stuttgart, München and Turin in the range are model names, not places of manufacture.
Successor to GUB, the East-German state watch combine that consolidated the surviving Glashütte makers after WWII; privatised in 1994 and bought by the Swatch Group in 2000.
Founded by Marco Lang and Mirko Heyne, both graduates of the Glashütte watchmaking school; the workshop sits in Radeberg, in the Dresden hinterland adjacent to the Glashütte cluster.
The 19th-century Grossmann manufacture closed in 1885; the modern brand was re-established by Christine Hutter in 2008 to produce watches at the finishing standard of the pre-war Saxon makers.
The original Robert Mühle workshop supplied precision measuring instruments to the Glashütte watchmaking industry from 1869; re-established as a wristwatch maker in 1994 by Hans-Jürgen Mühle.
Founded by Roland Schwertner in the months after reunification; the brand's Bauhaus-derived design language and in-house calibres made it the most-recognised post-revival Glashütte name outside the haute end.
Originated in the pre-war Glashütte cluster as UROFA, the rohwerke (movement) supplier; the brand was rebuilt in West Germany after the war and returned to Glashütte in 2011 after reunification settled supply chains.
Founded 1893 in Glashütte by Johannes Dürrstein as Uhrenfabrik Union, on 1 January of that year. The 1893 date is not unbroken continuity: the firm was struck from the commercial register in 1936 and the name lay dormant for roughly sixty years before it was revived in 1996, bought by the Swatch Group in 2000 and separated from Glashütte Original as its own brand in 2008.
Founded 1878 in Elsfleth by Gerhard D. Wempe, on 5 May, as a jeweller rather than a watch manufacture. The company is still Hamburg-based; what sits in Glashütte is the manufacture and the chronometer testing laboratory, housed in the restored Glashütte observatory that Wempe bought in 2005 and reopened in 2006.