Introducing
Mühle-Glashütte
With the rise of micro and independent brands, or should we say, the explosion of such brands, many watch enthusiasts, collectors, and professionals question whether these newcomers are worthy of anyone’s attention as they neither have legacy nor heritage. Because there is something unique about having either or both qualities which give the consumer reassurance that the watches from long-established brands are of a certain high quality and legitimacy. In many ways, that is true. In others, it isn’t. But globally speaking, and as far as our experience goes, brands which have been around for a while—a century or a few decades—bring about something unique to the industry. That is a know-how in one or multiple areas, a certain design aesthetic that has been refined over the years and never radically changed, an established network of distributors, a caché, and indeed a legitimacy for having designed, manufactured, and sold tens and thousands of watches through each they’ve learned something new about the consumer, the industry, and their place within it.
What connects 99% of the brands we talk about on Mainspring is their full independence (in regards to conglomerates and groups) as well as their ability or innate nature to fly under the radar, either on purpose because they solely focus on making good watches and not waves in the media, or unbeknownst to them but for the same reasons. One such brand is Mühle-Glashütte, a family-owned company which has been in existence in one way or another since 1869, founded in Glashütte—the cradle of contemporary German watchmaking—by Robert Mühle, a trained precision toolmaker. The brand as we know it today wasn’t called that until 1994 when the 4th generation re-established the brand as an independent entity. But we will talk about all of this in a second. What demarcates Mühle-Glashütte from the plethora of watch brands, and more specifically from the many historical ones, is the fact that its design, manufacturing, and managing philosophies have remained intact for the past 156 years. The result: a unique contribution to the industry and to the world.
Left to right: Fanny, Thilo, and Dustin Mühle
Credit: Bam-Image
Six Generations of Metamorphoses
A lot has happened since 1869 and the creation of the first iteration of Mühle-Glashütte then called “Robert Mühle Glashütte i.S." The Mühle family established itself in the area as early as the 14th century and started to become involved with the watchmaking industry as early as 1860. The brand’s founder and first generation of managing director, Robert Mühle, created the company to respond to the demand of all of Glashütte’s watch and component manufacturers to standardize the measuring instruments they themselves created and used to make such components. The situation was such that each company used its own measuring systems, machines, and scales, and so there was a need to create something that would work for everyone. Robert Mühle therefore took on the job and created “Robert Mühle Glashütte i.S." to craft fine dial gauges and high-precision measuring instruments that were necessary to measure the dimensions and thickness of cases and movement parts. The culmination of Robert Mühle’s extraordinary engineering capabilities came in the form of a dial gauge that was accurate to the thousandth of millimeter (0.001mm) which was unheard of at the time.
At the beginning of the 20th century and through the end of World War II, the company operated under a new name it switched to in 1905, “R. Mühle & Sohn”, named so to celebrate Robert Mühle’s sons involvement with the family business. During that time, “R. Mühle & Sohn” not only continued to manufacture precise measuring instruments—which it had been making for many decades—but also seized the opportunity to make speedometers and gauges for the car and motorcycle industries that were booming at the turn of the new century. Through multiple strategic partnerships, the company made rev counters, dashboard clocks, and speedometers that could be seen equipping cars and motorcycles in Germany, in some instances for the very first time. “R. Mühle & Sohn” went as far as engineering and manufacturing new movements and systems that made it possible, for example, to have removable car dashboard clocks with an 8-day power reserve and precision speedometers that could be found on EMW (today’s BMW) and Triumph machines.
Because “R. Mühle & Sohn” had diversified its productions, it was able to survive the Great Depression that saw many Glashütte-based watch companies close their doors.
Robert Mühle (3rd from the right, first row) and his family
But it was at the end of World War II, after the bombing of Glashütte by the Soviets, and the nationalization of the city, that the first metamorphosis of the Mühle family company took place. 80% of the business and its manufactures were expropriated or closed down by the newly formed government, where most of its machinery and equipment were moved or requisitioned to make watches and clocks for the military. Only 20% of it remained in Gaslhütte, incorporated within the Zeiss factories to only effectuate repairs. The Mühle family name, whose reputation as makers of fine measuring instruments, gauges, and clocks, had not been forgotten, was revived and brought back to its prime in 1945 by Hans Mühle, Robert Mühle’s grandson, who had returned from Poland at the end of the war. Encapsulating the third generation Mühle, Hans Mühle reestablished the family company under the name “Ing. Hans Mühle” (“Ing.” stands for “Ingenieur”) which made measuring instruments for various industries, for example travelling mechanisms and escapements for the photography and cinema industries or motion works for pressure and temperature measuring devices.
Original Mühle Factory, circa 1869
Mühle Factory, circa 1950
Hans Mühle passed away in 1970 and his son, Hans-Jürgen Mühle, representing the fourth generation, took over the company for two short years before it was expropriated for a second time and became part of a state-owned business called "VEB Feinmechanik Glashütte" ('Glashütte Precision Engineering’,) therefore initiating its second metamorphosis. Hans-Jürgen Mühle became the plant manager until 1980 when VEB, and therefore “Ing. Hans Mühle” were incorporated into the "VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe" ('Glashütte Watchmaking Plants'), known as GUB, in other words a conglomerate of Glashütte watch and instrument manufacturers. That made for the third metamorphosis. From 1980 through 1994, Hans-Jürgen Mühle gradually climbed the GUB corporate ladder, first working in its sales department before becoming its Sales Manager and then being appointed Managing Director of GUB in 1990. Under the name GUB the conglomerate made clocks and wristwatches but was eventually bought by a French company in the early 1990s which stopped the production of marine chronometers* which Hans-Jürgen Mühle was mostly responsible for selling throughout Europe. This purchase and merger initiated the fourth metamorphosis of the Mühle family.
*Although they continued to produce nautical instruments, ship clocks, and other fine mechanical instruments such as ECG recorders.
What happened forced and enticed Hans-Jürgen Mühle to recreate the family business in 1994, historically for a third time, under the name of “Mühle-Glashütte GmbH nautische Instrumente und Feinmechanik.” He had the know-how and connections with the right suppliers to jumpstart the next and current chapter of the Mühle family business, still in operation today under the leadership of Thilo Mühle, son of Hans-Jürgen Mühle and fifth generation managing director. Despite its storied past and massive legacy and involvement within the watch and instrument manufacturing industries in Glashütte since 1869, the family business didn’t start producing wristwatches until 1996 when one of the shipyards it supplied its instruments to—in order to equip the new ships they were building—asked the brand to make diver’s watches for their maintenance divers. This first and unique collaboration, which will resonate many years later with the introduction of the S.A.R.-Rescue Timer (which I will be reviewing for Mainspring.) gave birth to the first Mühle-Glashütte wrist-worn timekeeping devices, the Herren-Sporttaucher-Uhr or the men’s sport diving watch, and the Marinefliegeruhr-I or the marine pilot’s watch.
Hans-Jürgen Mühle installing a ship's clock, 1994
The Philosophy and Values Proper to Mühle-Glashütte
Glashütte is indeed the cradle of contemporary German watchmaking and many brands have established themselves in the small city of 1,700 inhabitants. Many brands which have been in existence for more than a century or many decades and whose name you might be familiar with: A. Lange & Söhne, Bruno Söhnle Uhrenatelier Glashütte, Glashütte Original, Nomos, Tutima, Union Glashütte, and of course Mühle-Glashütte. Of all the aforementioned and additional brands, only a few can claim an additional legitimacy for having been established in or for being run by someone from Glashütte, naturally Mühle-Glashütte but also Nomos as its current CEO, Uwe Ahrendt, is from the area. Vicariously through a few long-established watch manufacturers, the town of Glashütte has benefited from an extraordinary reputation now recognized the world over, which means that Mühle-Glashütte exists within a global competitive market as well as a local one. Though the fifth and sixth generations running the company, respectively Thilo Mühle and his children, Fanny and Dustin Mühle, do not seem to be majorly concerned as they carry out their family’s hyperfocused philosophy of making excellent timekeeping devices. Nothing more.
Since Hans-Jürgen Mühle’s early 1970s takeover of the Mühle legacy, two main precepts have been guiding the design and manufacturing of Mühle instruments: superlative legibility and accuracy. For the past 25 years, Thilo Mühle’s chief task has been to preserve certain decisions made by his father, mainly ensuring that time is easy to read on a Mühle timepiece and that the movements are regulated to run at 0/+8 seconds per day, never in the negative deviation. These two precepts have been infused into all of the brand’s collections, all of which are staples of the brand’s catalog, all of which have been in its catalog for many years. When asked to define the place that Mühle-Glashütte occupies within the global watch market, Thilo Mühle responded that his approach to running the family business, in relation to its competitors, is to first focus on preserving the Mühle heritage and core philosophy of making precise and highly engineered instruments and watches, reliable machines anyone can count on and pass down through the generations, instead of worrying about what others are doing.
Hans-Jürgen and Thilo Mühle
Marinefliegeruhr-I, 1996
As he related, once in a while however, Thilo Mühle pokes his head out to see what the Glashütte and international brands are doing, and quickly goes back to doing what Mühle does best. Thilo and his children are very much aware of the challenges the family business faces, given the constantly increasing number of new brands and of the outsourcing of more and more watch components in the Far East, lowering access to quality German-made components which would eventually make Mühle-Glashütte less competitive as it nevertheless strives to preserve the German know-how and watchmaking heritage. In other words, German-made watches are becoming more difficult to produce with each new generation, and while the Mühle family has been navigating the industry for more than 150 years, it started with nothing and continued to operate with very little as it was forced through multiple metamorphoses which condemned numerous other Glashütte brands to their eventual demise. Moreover, Mühle-Glashütte, unlike many other Glashütte-based watch brands, never benefited from any external financial backing or the wealth that typically comes with a new family of CEOs.
Mühle-Glashütte Office
For more than one and a half century, the Mühle family has been hard at work to bring about an authentic, engineering-focused and reliability-obsessed vision for measuring and timekeeping instruments, whilst being equally concerned for its longevity and for the security it can provide to its employees—all the while staying true to itself. In other words, Mühle-Glashütte makes good products that are designed—to repurpose a famous American saying—for the hardworking people by the hardworking people, a unique philosophy the Mühle family has been able to preserve through the generations and numerous setbacks. This is the basis for the brand’s existence and explains what makes it different and very much so unique from any other German or non-German watch brand. The Mühle company of today is as indifferent to maximizing profits as it was at the end of World War II, but it remains as concerned about precision and reliability as it was in 1869 when Robert Mühle created “Robert Mühle Glashütte i.S." This can be seen in two ways: in the investments it has been making in modifying Swiss movements and in the creation of the S.A.R.-Rescue Timer.
In-House Assembly
Bootstrapping In-House Mechanical Prowess
For years Thilo Mühle has been asked by customers and industry professionals if and when Mühle-Glasshütte would be making in-house movements because that’s what a brand with history and heritage is supposed to do. The answer is “never.” As indicated above, the Mühle family business started with nothing and experienced many major setbacks having been requisitioned twice by the government and having lived through a long period of communist-run East Germany. While the idea of making in-house calibers is lofty—which Nomos has been doing with great success and well-deserved praise for a few years now—it would require a multimillion euro investment which the Mühle family cannot make. It could enlist the help of investors in one of many forms which would come with the undesirable consequence of having shareholders tell the family how to run their own company. Given Mühle’s history, that is not nothing they want to put themselves through again and we can wholeheartedly understand why. However, Mühle-Glasshûtte remains in the business of making precision instruments which is why it started doing in-house customizations of calibers.
Thilo, Fanny, and Dustin Mühle take it to heart to honor Robert Mühle’s and his descendants’ engineering heritage and expertise through which they built the family’s name and reputation. And so they found modern ways to keep the tradition—and what sets Mühle-Glashütte apart—alive and well. Mühle-Glasshütte exclusively uses Sellita base calibers which it enhances with in-house made parts. They order assembled calibers, test them and then disassemble them, machine around a hundred parts and components using their own high-precision machinery, then re-assemble and regulate the movements. Mühle-Glasshütte also invents new components, for example it recently engineered and designed its own shock-resistant woodpecker-regulator to improve the reliability and robustness of all of its watches. They also design new complications and modules so that they could transform a triple-register chronograph movement to replace the hour counter by a power reserve indicator, something that Sellita doesn’t offer. And they are currently working on new complications which I am not, alas, at the liberty of sharing, but which will appear very soon in the brand’s catalogs.
In-House Assembly
Proprietary Woodpecker Regulator
However, all of this goes to show that the Mühle-Glashütte of today found ways to preserve the unique character that Robert Mühle had infused into the first iteration of the family business more than 150 years ago. Whilst the brand doesn't make in-house calibers it does make a lot of in-house parts and modules which are unique to Mühle. The benefit of this strategy is that the brand was able keep the prices of its precise and professional-grade tool watches reasonable, which it wouldn’t have been able to do should it had gone the route of manufacturing in-house movements. At its core, Mühle-Glashütte has always focused on making useful things which people can use and abuse, actual tools which had clear purposes and use-cases. Thilo Mühle couldn’t have justified to its customers a price hike solely because he would have decided for the brand to make calibers, nor could his children, Fanny and Dustin, have justified such decisions as it wouldn’t have been in line with the family business’s core philosophy.
And so through this and through the S.A.R. Rescue Timer, we bit-by-bit better understand where Mühle-Glashütte has been and where it's headed.
In-House Assembly
The Case of the S.A.R. Rescue-Timer
Of all wristwatches the brand has released in the past three decades—and it has released quite a few—it is the most known for the S.A.R. Rescue-Timer, designed specifically for the German search and rescue teams from the “Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger.” or DGzRS. The latter came about in 2001 after that a small contingent of Mühle-Glashütte employees, including Thilo Mühle, visited with the DGzRS and pitched the idea of creating a watch specifically for them. Their initial thought was for a robust GMT because S.A.R. teams working in the North and Baltic seas would, in a romantic way, cross different timezones whilst operating on the vast expanses of the aforementioned bodies of water. But the reality was such that those brave men and women, who for the past 150 years, have been risking their lives to save those of civilians lost at sea, needed a bit more of a straightforward timekeeping device to replace all of the personal ones employees of the DGzRS have lost while on duty over the past few decades.
Hans-Jürgen Mühle handing over the first S.A.R. Rescue-Timer to the DGzRS in 2002
Indeed, unlike most search and rescue teams in the world, the DGzRS is privately owned and operated and entirely funded by donations made by German people from all around the country, even those who do not live near the water. Though Germany only has water to the north, the DGzRS has established 63 stations with rescue posts alongside the 3,700 km (2,300 miles) of coastlines which all German people are very familiar with. Because they are privately owned it means its employees have traditionally used their own watches on the job and rare are those which could withstand the extreme working conditions of the German S.A.R. teams. Thus the DGzRS indicated that they would need something else than a GMT and so, through this new collaboration and intense series of back-and-forth, the team from Mühle-Glashütte came up with designs and spec sheets which they would submit to the organization, which the latter could comment back on and make suggestions, working from sketches and drawings and various other documents. After months of work, three of the key design and technical components of the watch were established.
First, the crystal had to be exceptionally resistant to shocks which is why it was designed to be made of a piece of sapphire 4mm thick, something unheard of before in the world horology. Second, the case had to have superlative resistance to shocks as the watches were bound to be knocked over on rails and against the hulls of ships and all sorts of equipments they use during rescue operations, which is why Mühle came up with idea of the rubber gasket enveloping the bezel. Third, the case also had to be free of sharp corners and edges because the S.A.R. teams generally pull the people they are rescuing into the boat by the arms and legs and thus this would prevent them from causing further harm. The brand also came up with the idea of orienting the hour markers at the cardinal points in an unusual manner, where those are the 3, 6, and 9 point inwards while the marker at the twelve points up, which makes it easier for team members to know where the “front” is. The first models of the S.A.R. Rescue-Timers were issued to the DGzRS in 2002.
S.A.R. Rescue-Timer
S.A.R. Mission-Timer Titan
The Sixth Generation of Mühle Leadership
The way in which Mühle-Glasthütte went about the partnership with the DGzRS, and therefore the creation of its most iconic collection, perfectly exemplifies, and acts as a reminder of, how the brand has operated and what it has be standing for since 1869: making simple yet precise instruments for those who need them and taking on the jobs that nobody else would. And this purpose-driven approach to creating highly engineered measuring tools and clocks and gauges permeates the family’s legacy and how-to approach of running the business. A philosophy which is deeply anchored in first-hand experiences and on meeting the real needs of their customers, as well as diversifying the family’s expertise in various fields to make it possible for the brand to continue to mold itself to the ever-changing political circumstances and needs of the market. Which is why, initially, Fanny and Dustin Mühle didn’t study with the plan of joining the family business, nor did they start their professional careers at Mühle-Glashütte, but instead were encouraged by their father to build their experience elsewhere.
Left to right: Fanny, Dustin, and Thilo Mühle
For Fanny, it came in the form of going as far away from watches as possible since her family has been in watchmaking for five generations and that horology is what they mostly talked about. When she was a teenager, and whenever discussing the possibility of joining the family business later on, Fanny was concerned that the storied legacy of Mühle-Glashütte wouldn’t be a good fit for her strong drive to bring about change which was commensurate with her high levels of energy and personal drive. So she went on to study physical therapy and social education which she practiced for numerous years in addition to doing social-based work. But eventually, throughout the years she spent following her own path, she came to admire the tenacy and resilience her family has shown for more than one and a half century, and the tremendous energy they had to have and burn through in order to recreate the family business through all of the metamorphoses it experienced. In other words, her energy is in her blood and she concluded that the best place to invest it in is family business.
Today, Fanny leads the sales and customer care department while her brother Dustin is in charge of the production and manufacturing departments.. His path to joining the family business was akin to Fanny’s, in the sense that he first went on to do his own thing, studying aeronautical mechanics which allowed him to nevertheless work with physical objects— tools and machines. Later one, and perceiving that Mühle-Glashütte could once again in the future find itself in a bad spot, Dustin decided to study engineering and economics so that he could bring a unique and specialized set of skills to the family business, one that is radically different from Fanny’s, yet both equally vital to the sustainability of Mühle-Glashütte. Before becoming the head of the production and manufacturing departments, Dustin worked in the purchasing department dealing with the Mühle-Glashütte’s manufacturing partners, aligning himself perfectly with his future company goals. Thilo Mühle has been with the company for almost 25 years, Dustin for seven years and Fanny for four. They represent the fifth and sixth generations of Mühle leadership and we hope, will lead the path to many more.
Left to right: Hans-Jürgen, Fanny, Thilo, and Dustin Mühle
Conlusion: Telling Stories
Even though, and mostly likely so, that in 1869, Robert Mühle wouldn’t see time measuring instruments in the same way as we do today, he most certainly was concerned about designing and manufacturing precise and reliable tools that people needed and would use for years to come. And that is how Thilo, Fanny, and Dustin Mühle see watches in 2025: as reliable and sustainable instruments which measure and indicate time, which can be used and abused for decades, designed by and for regular hard-working folks, easily repairable, and therefore which can be passed on through the generations, from parents who purchased the watch after earning a first salary, to their children who would go on to create new memories with it and contribute to the stories that have been infused within it before them. And so the story that the Mühle family has been writing for the past 156 years, and which can be heard directly from a Mühle at their factory in Glashütte or at a watch event in New York City, is that of creating authentic, quality, and sustainable tools and instruments.
By the way, the brand never made a battery-operated timepiece during the rocky period of the Quartz Revolution in 1970s-1980s, instead it stuck to its guns and to do what it does best, keeping a head down and highly focused on making good products. Nothing more.
Please take a moment to discover Mühle-Glashütte’s watches here and to learn more about the family’s legacy here.
Thanks for reading.