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.
7 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.
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.