In the world of haute horlogerie, few names command the same reverence as A. Lange & Söhne. Founded in 1845 in the German town of Glashütte, the brand is synonymous with uncompromising craftsmanship, mechanical ingenuity, and a distinctly Saxon approach to luxury.
Today, Wilhelm Schmid stands at the helm of this storied manufacture, a leader who swapped senior sales and marketing positions at BMW for a wholly different kind of engineering gig.
Since joining the company in 2011, Schmid has balanced respect for tradition with a forward-looking sensibility – overseeing the introduction of the contemporary sports watch family Odysseus, and ensuring that each novelty bearing the Lange signature remains rooted in the brand’s core values of precision, integrity and understated excellence.
In this exclusive interview, Schmid sits down with me amid the construction site of Lange’s new flagship London boutique to reflect on the philosophy behind the German brand’s enduring appeal, the responsibilities of stewardship in an era of rapid change, and the dos and don’ts of being a good watch consumer.
Square mile: The fact that we are meeting at the construction site of Lange’s new boutique on Old Bond Street probably says it all, but where does London fit in your grand plans?
Wilhelm Schmid: London has always been an important market for us because not only does it have a strong local community, but it’s also an international hub. It’s the kind of city where you just have to have presence but, on the other hand, it’s also where it’s most difficult to find a place that’s really in line with who and what you want to be. That’s why it took us a lot longer to find a place than originally thought, but we’re really pleased with the result. Now we have a building on Old Bond Street, which gives us the opportunity to create what I call a real customer journey.
I wish everybody could come to Glashütte and visit us at the manufacture because that’s the heartbeat of the company and that’s where we are and have been since 1845 – give or take the 40-year hiatus when we didn’t exist. The boutique is our home from home. Here, you should have the same feeling, the same sort of warm welcome, the same conversations with people that really are in line with what I believe the brand is, without having to make the effort of going to Glashütte. It’s important that our boutiques are where you can experience us in a purist form.
A. Lange & Söhne’s Old Bond Street salon
A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Daymatic Honeygold
SM: Old Bond Street is the heart of watchmaking in London – so how do you differentiate from your neighbours?
WS: A brand is like a promise and every brand is different. The promise we give is quite unique heritage and a very German design language. I call it the “two souls of our watches”. Firstly, the dial is very understated, very beautiful, legible, and precise. Then you turn the watch around and you see the opulence of the movement, which is a completely different story. Those two facets together are A. Lange & Söhne.
It’s up to the owner whether he or she wants to share that because it’s a conscious decision to turn a watch around.
The third point is the engineering – the craftsmanship that goes into the double assembly. It’s polished by hand, not by machine. It’s assembled by watchmakers. All that makes up our promise.
SM: Would you agree that Lange represents the benchmark for a ‘boutique style’ of watchmaker?
WS: We are certainly not a mass producer. We have I think 75 references in our book right now and produce about 4,500 watches annually, so that’s on average 60 watches of each. We know that’s not exactly true because we might produce more of certain references and far fewer of others. But thinking about those numbers in a huge market like watches, it’s what we’d call in German a ‘drop on a very hot stone’.
In a way that’s a very unique position to be in, because that means we know each and every watch, and it means we know each and every customer. And yet we are still this global brand. We are probably very big for an independent, we have our administration, we have our watchmaker school, but yes in our own way we are probably more of an artisanal brand.
SM: What does success mean for Lange?
WS: I think the biggest achievement is how long people stay with us and that we are still on a journey to uncharted territory. We launched the Saxonia Minute Repeater Perpetual in April, the 1815 in 34mm, and there are so many other things in the pipeline. That’s on top of all the development we have achieved over the last 15 years. We’ve created 75 movements from 1994 to today – and I would say a lot more than half of them in the last 15 years. So, if you take a step back, you can see an acceleration of what we’ve launched. That’s fuelling creativity – that feeling of never standing still in the company.
If you stop, if you start repeating yourself, if you are not creative, if you become complacent, you will not grow – and you do need to grow. I’m always for controlled, sustainable and slow growth, not a brand that can just ramp up or fall down production. I like that we’re continually growing, piece by piece.
SM: How do you maintain such steady growth over the years?
WS: When I joined 15 years ago, we were about 460 people globally. Now we are 900 and only in Glashütte we are now I think about 600-plus. So we are growing, but we have grown over those 15 years, not one year or two years or five. I always say there’s never a bad time for good watches. That’s my strong belief. So yes, year on year, we slowly but surely go our way.
You know, I once did a free climbing course – the next day, I had pain in muscles I didn’t even know existed! – but the instructor had a very nice philosophy, which I think relates to management.
He said, “If you want to become an old, experienced free climber, I recommend three points to hold your body in place and one moving for the next step. In other words, two feet and a hand for stability, then you can use the other hand to slowly but surely go upwards.
“If you want to be very quick and move all at once, it might work out but Jesus, if it doesn’t, you’re dead. If you don’t move at all, you’re also dead because eventually your muscles will give way and you’ll fall.”
So I’ve adopted this to my personal business philosophy. Management is about staying calm but moving forward in the right direction without taking too much risk that you fall down and die.
Jordana Schramm
SM: Anecdotally, it feels like we have stopped talking about resale value but are instead talking about value to the wearer. Is that something you have noticed?
WS: Isn’t that great? I think there was a time where the secondary market attracted the wrong sort of people. There was never a shortage of watches – there may have been a shortage of watches at retail price, but there was never a shortage of watches. And that just means that there were more customers than watches. If you build on that basis and ramp up production, you have a problem now, whereas if you didn’t you probably made the right decision.
I can remember the heated discussions in blogs and social media: “I wanted an Odysseus and they wouldn’t give it to me.” I think in hindsight it was good that we were very strict and we still build as many Odysseus models as we did five years ago.
You see it with the Odysseus HoneyGold we released at Watches & Wonders. I think we could have sold 500 of those watches right at launch and, trust me, there would still be customers complaining that they couldn’t get one.
We produced 100 because that’s the amount of production for which we had capacity – and we still deducted 100 from the other models because we now need the movements for the HoneyGold.
A. Lange & Söhne Odysseus in Honeygold
SM: Is that ever frustrating for you?
WS: It is sometimes because you see opportunities and you can’t capture them because you don’t have the watches. On the other hand, it’s a very, very good thing because it means that supply won’t outstrip demand. We are in the luxury business, we sell very expensive watches that nobody really needs. And if there’d been an excessive number of these watches that nobody needs, that’s a real problem.
Oversupply is done so quickly and it would be stupid for us, because if we oversupply one watch family and at the same time undersupply other watches, that’s creating a problem at both ends.
SM: The pressing question for many of our readers is allocation, because getting
a hold of an A. Lange & Söhne isn’t easy…
WS: It’s very straightforward. I think we touched base on this earlier on, but the watch market has attracted what I call politely an “investor collector”: they’re not passionate about watches, they’re passionate about the profit they think they can get out of a watch. Now, unfortunately, they don’t come with a stamp on their head saying, “I just want to flip your watch.” They come as customers that request an Odysseus in titanium or HoneyGold, a limited edition, a Minute Repeater Perpetual, God knows what. And that’s fair and fine, but it also has to be fair and fine for us to say, “We want to know you a little better. We want to understand why you want that particular watch.” It’s a good way to see if you are interested more generally in what we do or not? Because we make so many beautiful watches.
Just for some expectation management, if you come into our boutique and all you want is an Odysseus, it’s highly likely that you will leave us a bit disappointed because we have a lot of valued customers that we know very well who will get the Odysseus first. That’s the simple truth.
We must change everything if necessary to protect our way of fine watchmaking
SM: So the best advice is to love the brand and to get to know the team…
WS: You don’t create a friendship among human beings because you go into a pub and say, “I want to be your friend.” It’s so natural that we don’t do that and don’t think it’s a great idea. It takes time. But in watches, there are some who believe they deserve a relationship immediately when you open the door and ask for a watch that they know you can’t get. The first response should not be to complain but to understand why this isn’t possible.
SM: This is the point in the conversation where I feel obligated to talk to renowned petrolhead Wilhelm Schmid about cars. You have worked in both the motor industry and the watch industry.
Are there really any similarities between these two forms of engineering?
WS: There are none at all – and it’s drifting even further apart. If you ask me, I think the car industry is all about mass production and industrialisation even though they say “We want to make each car individual.” But the underlying manufacturing process is in the best way automated. A colleague of mine once said the best car is probably a car that no human being has touched or driven, but we believe the absolute opposite in watchmaking. So, yes, they are both examples of engineering, but there really isn’t a common denominator.
SM: I know you’ve said in previous interviews that the Datograph is the most important A. Lange & Söhne watch…
WS: It’s certainly the most important to me. Whenever people ask me that nasty question, “What is your preferred watch?” which is always like choosing your preferred child, that’s why I say it’s the Datograph Up/Down because that’s the first watch where I was really involved in the development process.
SM: Tell me about your involvement then, because you are not a watchmaker…
WS: No, the brand would be long dead if I’d been the watchmaker because I’m not a talent, I openly admit. But for that I have Anthony de Haas who creates the idea, his team actually – we are not a one-man show in any place, it’s always a team effort. We have Tino Bobe who makes sure that all these beautiful ideas eventually can be produced. And it’s me that ensures what we do is in line with the requirements of our business and customers. So I’m more the ambassador of the customer in that system, and that’s worked out quite well.
SM: So when it comes to the Datograph Up/Down, is there anything that you look at and say, “That was me”?
WS: Yeah, it’s a very easy thing. I was wearing the Datograph first generation and I said, “Guys, that’s not nice around the wrist. It doesn’t feel right.” I have a very normal wrist but the watch sat very high and I just didn’t feel comfortable with how it wore. I think a lot of other people thought the same. So that’s why the next generation was two millimetres wider, had a far better case back and it sits very nicely on the wrist. It’s as simple as this. Ever since then all the prototypes go on my wrist, not because I am special, but because I’m pretty average and we know if it sits well on my wrist, it will highly likely sit on many others.
A. Lange & Söhne introduced new 34mm models in the 1815 family in 2025.
They featured a slender 6.4mm case in white or pink gold with a striking blue dial.
SM: Is that why we saw the launch of the 1815 in 34mm at Watches & Wonders 2025?
WS: A lot of people were a little worried that if you come to Watches & Wonders with a Minute Repeater Perpetual and a HoneyGold Odysseus that these may take the shine totally off the 34mm. But then when you see it in the metal, and you realise it’s a star in its own right. Regardless of what people may think based purely on the dimensions, try it, put it on your wrist. It’s a beautiful watch. All the same, we were pretty surprised by the demand.
SM: You have been at Lange since 2011. In that time, we’ve experienced a boom in watches, a pandemic, and several key sociopolitical events. How has Lange and the watch world changed?
WS: Every time you think you know it all, there’s another thing that takes you by surprise. I would say everything has changed with one exception: we produce and develop our watches exactly the same way today that we did 30 years ago. And that’s what I always tell my team.
We must change everything if necessary to protect our way of fine watchmaking because I cannot afford to make people redundant in Glashütte because we made a mistake in the markets. That for me is the driving force. So I’m happy to change and to challenge everything but not the way we design or the way we produce our watches. That’s where the sharp line is drawn.
For more info, see alange-soehne.com
