“We are not taking any short cuts” Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne

According to Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne since 2011, the greatest challenges currently facing the brand based in Glashütte, near Dresden in Germany are those of delivering the watches on time and training new watchmaker.

No short cuts

“We don’t have enough watches, we aren’t able to satisfy all our clients and some of our retailers are losing their patience. But we cannot take any short cuts. Our quality standards require that we take the time to achieve a finished product, and that may be a slow process. Our growth will always be constrained by our desire for quality and our capacity to train new people so that we can increase our production team,” he explained at the recent Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH).

The difficulty facing the Maison is therefore to avoid creating an impression of arrogance. It takes an average of between three to five years to train watchmakers, developers, engravers and all the other skilled professions required to make a timepiece. And while Wilhelm Schmid admits to searching for a tree on which such employees grow, he hasn’t found one yet! A. Lange & Söhne now employs 680 people. “We represent a niche market in the watchmaking world. We are very exclusive, with entry-level products at around 18,000 CHF and prices that rise to over two million Swiss francs. Our clients are very well-to-do people, who often own several houses on different continents. They travel a great deal and buy products from all around the world.”

Two impressive faces

This year, the Saxon brand presented the Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar “Terraluna”, which is impressive from whichever angle you look at it. On the dial side, it has a regulator look commonly found in high precision watches. On the movement side, the moon phases appear in an orbital display which also indicates the position of the moon relative to the Earth and the Sun, a first for a wristwatch. This development is currently in the patent application process. The model also features a large date, the hallmark of A. Lange & Söhne, as well as a 14-day power reserve and a constant force escapement.

Another highlight of the 2014 SIHH was the Lange Zeitwerk Striking Time, the Saxon brand’s first chiming wristwatch, now available also in rose gold (in addition to platinum and white gold). Every 15 minutes, the mechanism strikes one of the two gongs: a high note to mark every quarter and a lower note to chime the hour. The push-piece at 4 o’clock can be used to deactivate the chimes. The hammers are then raised and the watch becomes silent. “The Zeitwerk Striking Time can be a real help in a meeting, making you aware that 15 minutes have passed with every chime. You then know you have to speed things up,” says the ever-pragmatic Wilhelm Schmid. What I like about this watch is its blend of contemporary esthetics with a very high class watchmaking spirit.”

The Lange 1 hits 20

For the year to come, Wilhelm Schmid has his sights firmly set on the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, which the brand has partnered for the last three years. This beauty competition for vintage cars—one of the world’s most prestigious—has taken place every year since 1929 on the shores of Lake Como in the North of Italy. This will be followed by the second Watches & Wonders, a watch exhibition which the CEO admits to have been “very positively surprised” by last year. And then finally in October, the twentieth anniversary of the first A. Lange & Söhne collection, the Lange 1, which rocked the boat back in the day with its ground-breaking large date, although the feature has since become one of the very hallmarks of the German brand.
Article published in WtheJournal.com