All About Glashutte Original

Many Historical watch brands are well-known for having galvanised the watchmaking industry in their home towns.

Entire watchmaking cities have sprung up around single brands, with experts from across the continent flocking to them in order to satisfy the growing demand for horological craftsmen. There is one brand, however, that appears to share its destiny with the town from whence it came, a brand that seems inexorably tied to the fate of its home, and a brand that gives back enormously to the community that helped to create it.

Glashütte Original was founded in 1994 with the privatisation of VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), an East German conglomerate formed in 1951 from the watch companies based in the small town of Glashütte, near Dresden.

The company remained lagely the same, but it was restructured to make way for a more modern business model, and its name was changed to Glashütte Original.

As a result of this, the company likes to refer to its founding date as 1951. And because it was founded by merging every watchmaking firm in the area into VEB, the town and the brand have become linked together.

Read more about Glashutte and our trip to Germany in our latest issue.