Nomos Facilities Tour!

[timelessluxwatches]

Trip to Nomos Glashutte!

Nomos kindly invited us to tour their magnificent studios in Germany! Join as we take you along for a photographic tour of their facilities!

This is a scale model of the famous watchmaking village of Glashutte. Here you'll find the color-coded Nomos buildings, including their boutique, apartment, office and watchmaking buildings.

Here's a look at Nomos' extensive collection of dials, which includes dials that made it into watches you can buy and even all of their prototypes, like the wooden dial above. You can even find Timeless Edition dials in there.

We spotted a Nomos watchmaker wearing a rare Nomos Picnic model, the first we've seen in real life.

This beautiful Nomos-owned house is actually for friends, customers and colleagues to stay during their visits.

This is actually quite interesting. Nomos maintains an utterly Nomos-esque chalkboard that keeps track of their many awards.

Nomos also has a "Nomosy" Mercerdes (because why wouldn't they) in a baby blue that is probably not coincidentally similar to their Lux watch.

Here are some views overlooking beautiful Glashutte.

Here's a look at the Glashutte Watch Museum!

This is a look at Nomos' super modern main office.

Our tour of the main office begins.

Here's the Nomos Lux, one of Nomos' highest end watches. The VP of Nomos actually tells us that the Lux is one of his personal favorites.

Naturally, all of the Nomos models are prominently on display against the windowed backdrop of Germany.

Here we take a look at almost all of Nomos' models.

Anna tries on the new Minimatik Champagner.

A beautiful Nomos Orion Rose.

Even our own Timeless Club is archived here.

A close up of Nomos' striking Zurich.

Here's Nomos' runaway hit, the Metro.

Here's Nomos' new DUW 3001 ultra-thin automatic, one of the company's greatest achievements. It's unbelievably thin and yet sacrifices no performance. Nomos also tells us that it's even easier to work on than its older automatic movements.

Here's a close look at one of my favorite Nomoses, the Lambda. Along with the Lux, these constitute the German brand's high-end and feature their most beautiful movements.

Here's a limited edition Club that looked pretty wild.

Here's a look at the components and blanks involved in Nomos' movement making process. Internally, the Nomos tolerance is just 4 micrometers. The mainplate alone has 36 different levels.

It takes anywhere from 2 to 8 hours to mill the movement. The machines that complete this process are operating 24 hours a day and are constantly checked to make sure they're running properly. The actual finishing and assembly of the movements is done by hand in a separate building.

This is what they call the "chronometer" building. This is where R&D, assembling and finishing is done.

Here's Dan with a watchmaker.

This room is dedicated to Nomos' in-house swing system escapement. There are 6 watchmakers who dedicate their entire time to assembling the swing system. They must have incredible focus because my personal Timeless Club II is close to +0/day.

The highest end movements are assembled and finished by only two watchmakers. The total output of this particular studio is just 2 to 3 watches per week. Quite interestingly, because these movements are hand-engraved, you can actually tell which of the two watchmakers made your particular movement as they have unique styles.

Here's an example of some of the fine engraving done on these movements using this tool.

Interestingly, those little red dots are glue.

Here are some of the date rings that go into Nomos watches.

This beautiful house, colloquially known as the Nomos Mansion, is available for customers of gold Nomos watches to stay in if they opt to pick their new watch up from the factory. The house is actually located in Dresden, about a 40-minute drive from Glashutte.

Nomos is most famous for their Glashutte location (it is, after all, in their name), but they also have a major office in Berlin, where we took this photo. This is the facility that controls advertising, public relations and, most importantly, watch design. The man in the second photo is Thomas, the designer of the hit Ahoi.

Here's a look inside the Berlin offices.

On the wall in Berlin they've got papers listing possible design options for inspiration.

Here are possible design paths for a given watch.

This is the inspiration board for the Ahoi. You can see some of the elements that made it into the production watch here.

These are some of the tools that Nomos uses to design watches.

All in all, a wonderful and educational trip. Thanks Nomos!

[Baco Noir]

Looks like a fantastic tour! The picnic dial is very cool and like nothing I've ever seen before.

I see Anna really liked that Champagner and it seems to have followed her home. :-).

[timelessluxwatches]

Lol I'll definitely say the Picnic is something I've never seen before, although I'm not sure if it's for me.

I'm familiar with it because when we are designing Nomos LEs, we'll often take a look at what's already been made, both in terms of inspiration and to prevent from making something too similar to a past model. We were definitely surprised to find the Picnics around the time when we were making the first Timeless Club.

[timelessluxwatches]

You know, the VP of Nomos (a man) just adores the Champagner. It's one of his favorite personal watches.

[carl]

Thanks for the great pictorial tour! I can further understand why you guys are so passionate about the Nomos brand, and the efforts you make to promote them. Especially, the beautiful Timeless LE designs.

Cheers,
Carl

ps Gorgeous and very appropriate Mercedes!

[timelessluxwatches]

Lol yes, it seems so obvious, in retrospect, that they'd have a powder blue Mercedes

[aerome]

Great story, thanks for the post.