Wempe and Glashütte Celebrate Watchmaking Milestones
The small city of Glashütte is the center of a German watchmaking industry, producing timepieces that have been getting a great deal of recognition around the world. In some cases the companies are even challenging the dominance of the Swiss watch industry.
The German watchmakers are known for producing timepieces with distinct characteristics, such as minimalistic aesthetics (think Bauhaus) with an emphasis on readability. Mechanical details include extra-long power reserves and three-quarter sized base plates for extra stability.

The Hamburg-based company, Wempe, is well known as a premier retailer of luxury watches and jewels on three continents. The company was founded in 1878 by Gerhard Diedrich Wempe as a small watchmaking and repair shop and grew into an international retail business. About 10 years ago the company, under the leadership of Kim-Eva Wempe, extended its brand to its own line of watches made in Glashütte.
The company first partnered with watchmaker Nomos Glashütte to produce two watch lines: The Wempe Zeitmeister (time champion) and the Wempe Chronometerwerke. Later it built its own chronometer workshop on the grounds of a derelict astronomical observatory specifically to produce chronometers. The facility on green rolling hills surrounded by farmland was soon joined by a watchmaking training center and the country?s only chronometer testing center, creating the German DIN standard 8319.

The comp...