Glashütte Original

Admired by collectors of vintage wristwatches for its iconic 1960s-era designs, such as the minimalist and elegant Spezimatic, Glashütte Original is one of the most prominent German watch brands, recognized universally for producing wristwatches that are as modern as they are an homage to traditional handcraftsmanship.

Today, this first-class company still manufactures its own movements as well as its dials. Its watch bridges and cocks are hand-engraved in-house by master craftspeople. And at Glashütte Original, the annual production of its offerings, even the highly desired best sellers, is limited to a few hundred editions or less of any model.

Unlike other established watchmakers, including Cartier, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, Glashütte Original was never the brainchild of one specific person, but rather the city for which it was named. Since 1845, the small German town of Glashütte has been home to the country’s leading watchmakers. With a loan from the Saxony government, entrepreneur Ferdinand Adolph Lange trained locals to become watchmakers, having identified a need for employment after the collapse of the area’s silver-mining industry.

Soon the town was attracting big names in the watchmaking business, namely Adolph Schneider, Moritz Grossmann and Julius Assmann. In 1878, the German School of Watchmaking Glashütte was established. Over the next several decades, business boomed until, in 1945, Soviet fighters bombed the watchmaking town, destroying most of the workshops. With East Germany under Soviet control, many of the workshops were merged under a state-owned firm called Volkseigener Betrieb Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (VEB GUB). This lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1994, German entrepreneur Heinz W. Pfeifer took over VEB GUB and renamed it Glashütte Original.

In 1995, the revamped Glashütte Original introduced the tourbillon watch Julius Assmann 1, which featured an intricate perpetual calendar movement and was named for one of the town’s pioneering watchmakers. In 2015, the brand also paid tribute to the past — and to its well-known Spezimatic model — with its Sixties Iconic Collection, a model housed in a 39-mm stainless-steel case available in five striking color schemes and gradient effects, with each intricately painted dial done so in-house. A diver’s watch called the Sea-Q followed in 2019, also as an homage to one of the brand’s ’60s-era models.

Since 2000, Glashütte Original has been part of the Swatch Group, and today, around 95 percent of Glashütte Original’s watch parts are made in-house, contributing to their meticulous quality and craftsmanship that merges the town’s rich heritage with new technologies.

Find a collection of vintage Glashütte Original wristwatches on 1stDibs.