The PHILLIPS Hong Kong Watch Auction: XVIII, takes place on May 24 and 25, 2024, at our West Kowloon headquarters. The auction includes more than 280 of the world's finest watches – and though we are loath to boast, we truly think it's one of the best catalogs we've ever put together. We'll be highlighting a number of the most interesting lots and stories featured in the sale right here, including the two Lang & Heyne models featured below.
– By Logan Baker
Lang & Heyne is one of the oldest existing independent brands to emerge from the modern German watchmaking scene. Founded in 2001 by a pair of young watchmakers named Mirko Heyne and Marco Lang, the company has built a steady following over the past two-plus decades as the Saxon watchmaker that’s just a bit different from the well-known Glashütte brands.
For starters, unlike A. Lange & Söhne, Nomos, and Moritz Grossmann, Lang & Heyne is not in Glashütte at all – rather, they’ve built up their operations in the Saxon capital city of Dresden. Although it’s a mere 45-minute drive from the small watchmaking hamlet of Glashütte, the choice of Dresden has reinforced Lang & Heyne’s fierce independent streak. (Plus, Dresden is technically the birthplace of mechanical timekeeping in Saxony, dating back to the reign of King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony in the early 19th century.
Lang & Heyne is Saxon and proud of it – but they’re also entirely different from their colleagues in Glashütte.
Picking Dresden over Glashütte means a few things, most importantly for collectors, it means Lang & Heyne pays no heed to elements typically considered part and parcel with Glashütte watchmaking, like the three-quarter plate. Lang & Heyne instead chooses to provide as much visual access to their movement components as open as possible, without any large bridges blocking the view, in order to best highlight their dedication to hand finishing. You won’t find any movement surfaces finished by machine at Lang & Heyne, only traditional handcraft.
The strategy has worked out well for the brand. They’ve introduced no less than nine different in-house calibers since 2001, and when I spoke with the Lang & Heyne team a few weeks ago, they mentioned that their order sheet is deeper than ever before, despite achieving new annual production records each of the past two years.
But the Lang & Heyne story is more unusual than it may appear. Mirko Heyne left the brand in 2002, one year after it was founded, to become the head of research and development at Nomos. Marco Lang followed suit in 2019, leaving his first company behind to start a brand new workshop completely under his own name.
"How is that possible," you may ask?
Well, there are two key elements that have kept Lang & Heyne functioning better than it ever has, despite losing its two founders and namesakes – something that has been a death sentence for many other brands.
The most important reason is the arrival of a man named Jens Schneider at Lang & Heyne.
Schneider currently serves as Lang & Heyne's Director of Development, a title that positions him as both the public face of the brand as well as the official guide of its horological direction. Schneider is a longtime veteran of the German watch industry, with a resume about as strong as you might hope for when it comes to German watchmaking in the modern era. He cut his death in the early 1990s at VEB Glashütte Uhrenbetrieb (GUB) – now known as Glashütte Original – before joining up with a resurgent A. Lange & Söhne, where he served a critical part in the development and creation of many of the company's most famous releases, including the Zeitwerk.
He then joined a nascent Moritz Grossmann, serving as its Head of Construction for a number of years in the early 2010s. More recently, he had set up his own consulting workshop right in the middle of Glasütte proper – which is where Lang & Heyne connected with him to begin with. Schneider was already working with Lang & Heyne as a consultant when Marco Lang said his goodbyes, allowing for about as smooth of a transition as a company could hope for when losing one of its namesakes and the last remaining founder on staff.
Of course, the only reason such a seamless transition was possible to due to Lang & Heyne's current ownership structure. Marco Lang sold majority ownership of the brand to a Munich-based gentleman named Prof. Dr. Ulrich L Rohde, the son of the one of the co-founders of Rohde & Schwarz, an international electronics group headquartered in Germany. At the same time, Dr. Rohde also purchased Uhren-Werke-Dresden (UWD), a small firm Marco Lang had set up to serve as a movement supplying outfit for any brands interested in traditional, high-grade Saxon watchmaking.
Once Dr. Rohde was officially in control of both Lang & Heyne and UWD, he incorporated an entirely new business group named Tempus Arte GmbH & Co. KG that is centered on the two operations. Tempus Arte has since grown even more, adding Stowa, the historic Black Forest-based maker of fleiger pilots' watches, to its roster of brands, as well as a 50 percent stake in Blaken, a watch customization specialist.
The structure provided by Dr. Rohde's ownership and the Tempus Arte group combined with Schneider's know-how and capability has transformed Lang & Heyne's business. Since Lang's departure in 2019, annual production has increased from approximately 40 to 50 pieces to between 100 and 150 watches a year. Headcount has also naturally increased. Lang & Heyne and UWD, which now share the same office and workspace outside of Dresden, totaled no more than 20 employees in 2019. Today? They count 35 people, split between watchmakers, finishers, and machinists.
A major part of Schneider's strategy has been to make sure Lang & Heyne's existing customer base is satisfied with their watches, focusing on service, as well as paring down the total number of in-house calibers. Schneider has focused on two specific movements, the caliber VI and caliber VIII, for their slimmer dimensions and innovative architecture (many previous Lang & Heyne movements were based on historic Saxon pocket watches, the caliber VI and VIII are completely modern creations). Schneider worked with Lang & Heyne's watchmakers to refine and adjust the existing structure of those movements to allow for a more straightfoward assembly and repair process that reduces room for potential error.
Schneider perfected the process that Lang had started.
Another big factor in Lang & Heyne's success under Schneider has been the introduction of the company's first stainless steel sport watch in 2021, the Hektor. It came paired with a stainless steel bracelet, and was officially the first Lang & Heyne with a central seconds hand. It had a lower price point than any previous Lang & Heyne wristwatch as well, under USD $20,000.
Part of the sacrifice in creating the Hektor came with the movement. The manual-wind caliber 33.2 is based on an older UWD movement that has been supplied to others. However, UWD effectively doesn't exist today as it did in the past. There is no separate staff dedicated to UWD movements, it's all created by the same team behind Lang & Heyne's traditional creations. The result is a much more modern movement architecture, with an impressive degree of decoration, even if might not meet the same level of handwork found in models powered by the caliber VI and caliber VIII.
One such model, powered by the shaped caliber VIII, is the Georg. Arguably Lang & Heyne's most popular wristwatch from its more traditional line, the Georg was released in 2017 and is the brand’s first rectangular wristwatch. The name reference's Georg, the “Bearded” Duke of Saxony, from the 16th century. The watch features a unique rectilinear case design (in platinum, 18k white gold, and 18k pink gold) with triple lugs, paired with a white enamel dial and the manual-wind caliber VIII inside.
Interestingly, Phillips didn't sell its first example of a Lang & Heyne wristwatch until November 2020, more than a year after Marco Lang's departure. However, in the three years since, 13 different examples have hit our rostrum, with the top result coming at Phillips Hong Kong in May 2022, when a unique prototype example of the Friedrich II Remontoir sold for HKD $819,000 (more than USD $100,000).
You can learn more, place a bid, and view the entire Hong Kong Watch Auction: XVIII catalog right here.
About Phillips In Association With Bacs & Russo
The team of specialists at PHILLIPS Watches is dedicated to an uncompromised approach to quality, transparency, and client service. Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo holds the world record for the most successful watch auction, with its Geneva Watch Auction: XIV having realized $74.5 million in 2021. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, the company sold 100% of the watches offered, a first in the industry, resulting in the highest annual total in history across all the auction houses at $227 million.
About Logan Baker
Logan has spent the past decade reporting on every aspect of the watch business. He joined Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo at the start of 2023 as the department's Senior Editorial Manager. He splits his time between New York and Geneva.
Recommended Reading
The Indie Insider: Jochen Benzinger Is Germany’s Best Kept Horological Secret
Patek Philippe’s TV-Shaped Ref. 5020 Is A Genuine ‘90s Deep-Cut
The Indie Insider: It’s Hajime Asaoka’s World – We’re Just Living In It