Latest / What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast / S01E09: Watch Stories - Dornblüth & Sohn: Father, Son, and the Quietest Workshop in Haute Horlogerie

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S01E09: Watch Stories - Dornblüth & Sohn: Father, Son, and the Quietest Workshop in Haute Horlogerie · What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast

0:01
There's a small village in central Germany called Kalba.
0:04
You've not heard of it. There's no real reason why you
0:07
would have 7500 people live there.
0:10
There's no famous restaurant. There's no prominent landmark.
0:13
And actually the one prominent landmark, if we were going to
0:15
give one, is the ruins of a 9th century castle.
0:19
The town doesn't even show up on it like a tourist map.
0:22
In a modest two-story house with a pointed Gable on a quiet St.
0:27
the small Creek running through the property, and apple and plum
0:31
trees in the yard, there's a workshop.
0:33
Nine people work there. They make somewhere between 120
0:37
and 180 watches per year total. You probably never heard of them
0:41
either. And that's the story.
0:44
And that's why this story has a big problem.
0:53
In cobbler, small and plain 7500 names brick dust on the morning
1:00
air. Half the town is standing.
1:02
Welcome back to What's on Your rest Day?
1:04
I'm Wachovsky. Last week we did our first
1:07
single brand deep dive. Tropic, flamboyant, charismatic
1:12
story, rich resurrection of a watchmaker who almost helped
1:16
found Patek Philippe. Almost, kinda.
1:20
By far the most response that I've had from an episode so far.
1:24
So thank you for that. And thanks for the suggestion on
1:26
a single brand deep dive. I think it worked pretty well.
1:31
We're making this kind of like a recurring thing on this show.
1:35
So I will be throwing out these individual brands and also we're
1:38
going to be calling them kind of watch stories as we work through
1:41
these. So if you have recommendations
1:42
of brands that you want deep dives on, they do a little bit,
1:44
they take a little time for me to do the homework, but I'm
1:47
excited to do them for you today.
1:49
We're staying in the same format, single brand all the way
1:51
down, but we're going somewhere completely different tonally.
1:56
I think geographically, philosophically, it's very
1:59
different. Because if Tropic was the noisy,
2:02
charismatic Geneva end of the watchmaking world, specifically
2:07
of the independent watchmaking world, today's brand is the
2:10
quiet monastic village in Saxony on that other side of it.
2:16
But in Germany, right, Dornbluth and Sun, it's a DORNBLUTH and
2:23
son. It's SOHN.
2:26
And you'll actually, you'll, you'll see it spelled
2:28
differently even in German. They have an E inside of
2:31
Dornbluth. And when you see Dornbluth, I
2:34
say Dornbluth. But it's really Dornbluth and
2:36
son. And so it's father and son and
2:39
I'd argue is one of the purest, most honest watchmaking
2:43
operations in the entire world. So pour something again, only if
2:48
you're, if you're, if you're not driving, settle in.
2:50
We're going to Kalba, so segment one.
2:52
We're going to call 1959 a sketch on a workbench.
2:57
So let's set the tone here. To understand Dorm Bluth, you
3:00
have to start with a watchmaker named Dieter Dieter.
3:07
Dieter was born in 1939 in Saltzweidel.
3:11
I hope I'm pronouncing that right for my German brothers and
3:13
sisters in what would become East Germany.
3:16
And he's a trained watchmaker. And as part of his training, he
3:20
spent three years in Arts Burger.
3:23
I hope that's right, Arts Gerberger and the Ore Mountains,
3:27
and I'm sure I butchered that somewhere.
3:30
If we're talking about Germany, kind of the most demanding
3:33
traditional watchmaking education happens in that area.
3:37
And so in 1959, Dieter, 20 years old, freshly minted as a master
3:44
watchmaker, was repairing a particular pocket watch,
3:47
sterling silver, eccentric. It was small, second display, a
3:51
sturdy, beautiful movement of unusually kind of high quality.
3:56
And this repair took Dieter weeks to complete.
4:00
But something happened when he was working on it.
4:02
He fell in love with the watch. So when the owner came to pick
4:06
it up, Dieter was, in his own words, rather sad to give it
4:11
back. And I, I kind of, you know, I, I
4:14
hope sometimes that the people that are working on my watches
4:17
have that kind of same feeling that there's just amount of care
4:20
and love that they're putting into what they do and also that
4:22
they're enamored with some of the the pieces, right?
4:24
So that same evening, November 1959, I believe, he sat down and
4:30
he started designing A wristwatch movement based on the
4:32
architecture of that pocket watch.
4:34
Now, remember, he was working on it.
4:35
He had completely disassembled it, so he had an idea of what
4:38
that architecture looked like. So he sketched it out and he
4:41
started cutting the first wheels.
4:44
He laid out bridges. And then unfortunately or
4:47
fortunately, life happens. Dieter was called to a small
4:52
village in Calba and Saxonyult and where an elderly couple,
4:57
Elsa and Paul Beckman, they'd run a local watch shop.
5:00
And they were retiring and they needed a successor.
5:04
And you have to remember what small towns were like, right?
5:06
The community itself needed someone to keep the shop
5:09
running. A young watchmaker, right?
5:12
A young master watchmaker had a calling that was more pressing
5:17
than his own ambitions. He was going to help this
5:18
community, right? So Dieter took over the
5:21
Beckman's business. He moved to Kalba and he started
5:24
repairing watches and clocks for the people of that village.
5:27
And then the shop grew and eventually he had eight
5:29
employees. He had a life and he had a
5:31
family. And he had a son named Dirk.
5:34
It's DIRKI believe in German. It's actually pronounced Dirk.
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And, and the wristwatch movement design, the one that had
5:43
inspired, you know, was inspired by that sterling silver pocket
5:47
watch. He had to give back that those
5:51
drawings. And that idea kind of went into
5:53
the drawer of a workbench and then it stayed there for 40
5:56
years. Those of us that have been
5:58
around a while, we kind of know what some of those projects and
6:02
aspirations feel like sometimes when life gets in the way.
6:04
So Segment 2, we're going to call 1999 the birthday gift.
6:09
So on October 1st, 1999, Dirk Dornbluth turned 60.
6:14
And by then his son Dirk, which again were say Dirk, had become
6:18
a master watchmaker himself. Dirk had grown in the up in the
6:21
workshop, and he learned the craft that his father's bench
6:25
had taught him. He'd gone and become one of, you
6:28
know, a small handful of fully credentialed watchmakers in
6:33
Germany and fully credentialed master watchmakers.
6:37
So for his father's 60th birthday, Dirk made him a gift.
6:41
And he made it himself by hand from scratch.
6:45
And it was a stainless steel wristwatch.
6:48
The movement was based on the legendary glass hoot caliber was
6:51
a 60.3. And Dirk had designed and
6:55
assembled the entire watch in his own time around his work in
6:59
secret, and he handed it to his father as a birthday celebration
7:03
gift. And Dieter, understandably, was
7:06
overcome. He held the watch, the watch
7:08
that his son had built for him by hand from his own design, and
7:11
something he had buried for 40 years just showed up in his
7:15
hand. Dirk was told the story, the
7:18
pocket watch from 1959. He pulled the sketches out the
7:22
drawers the the the dream right That same evening, on a paper
7:27
napkin at the birthday dinner, father and son Dieter and Dirk
7:32
started sketching out the design of what became the Dornbluth
7:37
caliber together. The dream Dieter had buried
7:40
since 1959 was being resurrected by his own son in 1999.
7:46
The founding and that founding of that story for me gives me
7:51
goosebumps. They founded the workshop just a
7:53
year later. D Dornbluth and Son.
7:57
The first watch, the model 99.2, was released in 2002.
8:01
It was based on design that Dieter had sketched in 1959,
8:06
more than 4 decades earlier. And that, by the way, is also
8:10
where the caliber 99 comes from. It comes from the the name 1999,
8:15
the year that that dream came back to life.
8:17
And so I want you to sit with that story for a second because
8:20
it is in its own and on its own, one of the most beautiful
8:23
stories in independent watchmaking. 40 years, a son who
8:29
without knowing his father had a buried dream, decided to build
8:32
him a watch and the gift unlocked it.
8:36
And then together they spent the next 20 plus years living out
8:40
this dream together. This is not a marketing story.
8:44
Again, this is not an origin myth invented after the fact for
8:49
a brand campaign by marketing executives in A room.
8:55
This is what actually happened and it shapes everything about
8:59
the watch, every single thing about their brand that comes out
9:04
of that workshop. In Kalba Segment 3, we're going
9:08
to call the workshop a village, a house, and nine people.
9:13
Let me describe this workshop itself, because the way that
9:17
Dornbluth makes watches is physically different from how
9:22
most of the industry makes them. The workshop is in a modest
9:26
two-story house on the on the street called vest Promenade.
9:30
And I think I pronounced that close.
9:33
It looks like W Promenade in the village of Kalba.
9:36
Again, apple and plum trees are in the yard.
9:38
This small Cle Creek runs through the property has this
9:42
pointed Gable over the entrance and the front of the house has a
9:46
large clock and modern kind of in style, but it's it's powered
9:49
by an old clock mechanism that Dirk himself actually maintains.
9:54
And again, nine people work there. 9 for comparison, a
9:59
single division of like a major glass suite watch manufacturer,
10:04
just one department would have more employees in the entire
10:07
dorm booth workshop. So every morning that all nine
10:10
of them, Dirk the watchmaker, the apprentices, they all gather
10:15
around a dining table in the middle of the workshop and they
10:18
have breakfast together and they discuss what each person is
10:21
going to be working on that day, how the operation runs, the
10:25
management structure, all of it. They have it at a breakfast
10:29
meeting. And then here's the part that
10:31
absolutely floors me. Approximately 80% of the parts
10:35
in a Dornbluth 99 series, those watches are actually made inside
10:40
of that workshop. The dials, the hands, almost all
10:43
of the movement components, the cases this come from a separate
10:47
metal working firm that has now grown into a watch making
10:51
supplier. But again, everything else is
10:54
made in Kalba and for, you know, the more recent Quintus
10:59
calibers, which is fully in house, that figure goes up to
11:02
about 95. They do not use sophisticated
11:06
CNC machines for almost all of this stuff.
11:11
They use traditional tools, older equipment, the swan neck
11:15
springs that regulate the balance.
11:17
Dornbluth actually mills them by hand from a steel round plate.
11:23
They use a pantograph, a freaking pantograph.
11:27
That's a tool from like the 19th century, Dornbluth stated.
11:31
And they're inside of their philosophy.
11:33
And I'm going to paraphrase this because I, I, I will butcher the
11:35
eloquence of the way that they can articulate this.
11:38
They want to prove that fine German watchmaking as it was
11:42
practiced 100 years ago is still possible today by Craftsman
11:48
without any computer controlled machines really even in an
11:52
Internet age. And that there is the detail for
11:56
me that completes this picture of what kind of operation this
11:59
is. When you receive a dorm booth,
12:02
the watch itself arrives in a wooden presentation box.
12:05
The box has this cut out on it and the cut out is basically a
12:09
clear window. You can put your finger through
12:11
it into the lid of this watch and you can see the watch head
12:16
through the box. So when even the watch is
12:18
closed, you can see your watch head and it's a beautiful piece
12:21
of design. The the box is not made in some
12:24
crazy factory. It's not even sourced for like
12:27
this like, you know, Asian distributor, right?
12:30
It's not sourced by a packaging supplier.
12:33
It's not even made by dorm booth themselves.
12:35
It's made by hand, one at a time by a local educator in Kalba
12:39
using local wood from their their area.
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Let that sit for a second as well.
12:44
The watch is built by 9 people in a house in a village.
12:47
The case comes from a small local metal working firm that
12:51
they're all friends with. The dial is silvered and
12:56
sublimated and finished in a workshop there on site.
13:00
The hands are heat blued at a bench by hand.
13:02
They literally hold them and heat them right and torch them
13:05
until they're the color that they want.
13:07
And then when it's all done, the watch is ready to ship to the
13:11
person who ordered it. And it's placed in a box by
13:14
another person who in the same village has handcrafted this
13:18
wood box by wood that was grown literally on their land.
13:24
There's no part of this watch that did not pass through the
13:26
hands of someone or in someone's vicinity.
13:30
That's in Kalba. The entire production is is
13:33
beautiful. The whole object, the entire
13:37
object is local. It's made by people.
13:41
The whole thing is a production of a small community of
13:46
craftspeople who all know each other, They all live in the same
13:49
place, they all care about getting it right because their
13:51
reputation in that small village depends on it.
13:54
And that is what handmade actually means.
13:58
Not finished by hands in some luxury manufacturer in
14:02
Switzerland with 800 person Staffs.
14:06
No, this. This is what handmade looks
14:08
like, taken to its real conclusion.
14:11
That is what Kalba means. This is what Dornbluth's
14:15
workshop is. It's an active argument that the
14:20
old ways can still work and the watches that come out of this
14:24
place are proof of that. Now segment 4 we're going to
14:27
call caliber 99 in the beautiful honesty of its origin.
14:31
So let me talk about the caliber 99 itself, because one of the
14:34
most interesting movements to me in in modern watchmaking and the
14:39
story behind it is even more interesting than the spec sheet,
14:42
the 99 caliber and its various sub variants.
14:45
And you're going to get a couple of them here, but 99.199 point,
14:49
299.399 point Reg the regulator. And then also there's a there's
14:55
a handful of others they're typically hand wound.
14:58
They're 18,000 vibrations per hour.
15:00
They beat at 2 1/2 Hertz. So there is a slow calm beat
15:06
rate to them. Now if you're referencing this
15:08
compared to my Zenith with 36,000 vibrations, right, it's a
15:12
completely different animal. This is A and if you think about
15:15
it, it actually makes sense, right?
15:16
When you think about the way that these oscillations will
15:18
slow back and forth, right? It's so much more peaceful.
15:21
It's so much calmer and then you think about the way that these
15:24
watches are designed and it just makes it just makes sense.
15:28
Now with that said, they are typically these marine
15:30
chronometer styles. Again, one of my favorite
15:32
designs is having a small seconds on a watch.
15:34
For example, at 6:00, they typically have this oversized
15:38
small seconds again at a sub dial and you might see them at 9
15:41
or you might see them at six, usually at 6:00.
15:44
And they're in this place that you would typically see
15:48
something that's unique. So on these old vintage and
15:51
antique pocket watches, you would see them on these ships,
15:54
chronometers and on most variants you would see a UF and
15:58
AB off on up German for up and down power reserve indicators.
16:04
Typically you might see those at like a 3:00.
16:06
So you might see on one side of the watch, if it's not just a
16:09
simple 3 hander, right, with a small seconds, you might
16:13
actually see them with these regulators on the sides.
16:15
You might see them with a power reserve on them.
16:18
Just fascinating. And the power?
16:19
Reserve indicator, by the way, has its own little story.
16:22
When father and son were laying out these dials, they noticed
16:25
that that there was this space at 3:00 that just looked
16:28
unbalanced and relative to the small seconds that they had on
16:32
some of the watches at 9:00, they wanted to add a power
16:35
reserve. But all of the other existing
16:37
power reserves and the mechanisms they use this kind of
16:41
planetary differential gear, and I don't want to get too far into
16:43
it, but it has, it has too many wheels.
16:46
And the indication what ends up happening is you get this
16:49
distortion. And so it's never really
16:51
accurate. It's close, but it's not
16:52
accurate. And so Dieter, while he was
16:55
waiting for his car at a local mechanics garage, he looked at
16:58
the small engine model in this showcase.
17:01
And specifically, he looked at this like bevel gear
17:04
differential from the car's rear axle.
17:07
And he asked the mechanic if he could borrow it, and he took it
17:09
home again, Small town, right? That's what you do and he and
17:13
Dirk worked out a way to use this automotive differential
17:16
principle to design this simpler 3 wheel power reserve mechanism
17:23
that's less than 3mm tall and gives a perfectly linear
17:27
accurate reading. So that is the off owned up
17:31
right AAUFUNDAB indicator on a Dormluth 99.
17:36
It was designed in their living room, inspired by a car part,
17:40
and it works better than most Hot Horology power reserves now.
17:45
And here's the part where some watch nerds get kind of prickly,
17:49
but I want to be honest about it because Dornbluth is honest
17:53
about it. The base architecture of the 99
17:56
Caliber is based on the Unitos 6498.
17:59
The Unitos 6498. It's a hand wound pocket watch
18:03
movement that that that ETA or ETA produces, and many
18:07
independent watchmakers use this as kind of like a starting point
18:10
because it's robust, it's well engineered and large enough to
18:14
allow for substantial reworking. The 6498 base shows up in
18:21
everyone from Panarai to a dozen other smaller brands.
18:27
So Dornbluth takes the 6498 and then once they get them in on
18:30
site, they throw away almost all of it.
18:34
Basically what remains is the core structural plate and then
18:37
literally everything else, the bridges, the wheels, the swan
18:39
neck regulator, the differential, the side by side
18:42
architecture, that all of that kind of stuff that gets tossed.
18:45
And it's just, it's fascinating because what they do is that
18:49
once they they have that core structure at the plate.
18:53
They do their own bridges, their own wheels, their own swan neck
18:56
regulators, their own differential, they do their own
18:59
dial side architecture and all of the finish finishing.
19:02
It's all hand done in Kalba and it's done with traditional
19:07
tools. And so by the end of the
19:08
process, the watch looks like nothing from Unitas and it runs
19:12
like nothing from Unitas. The bones started there, but
19:14
that's it. And so why do I bring this up
19:17
and why I respect Dorn Booth for not hiding it?
19:21
They don't. You know that they don't.
19:23
Bury this on their website. It's on.
19:24
It's on the front. You know, you can find this
19:26
information on their website pretty, pretty.
19:27
Obviously most independent watchmakers in this category
19:31
would obscure this origin, or they'd let people kind of assume
19:34
it was fully bespoke. And Dormbooth literally puts it
19:36
on their website. They tell journalists when they
19:38
swing by for a cup of coffee, they're completely transparent
19:41
about where the design starts and where their work begins.
19:44
And in 2012 they released the Quintus Q 2010.
19:50
It was their first fully in house caliber twin barrels, 52
19:55
hour power reserve, this Maltese cross, it's kind of this
19:58
indirect drive system and completely Dornbluth from the
20:04
ground up. So the answer here is really
20:07
this. In house question the 99 series
20:10
is heavily reworked from a Unitos base and the Quintus is
20:14
fully in house. And I would say take your pick.
20:16
I think if you're looking at the collector world, I think people
20:20
always kind of lean towards fully in house and they're
20:22
they're going to be a little bit more expensive.
20:25
But when you're talking about the way that these watches are
20:27
finished, it's it's six one way, half a dozen the other.
20:31
They are stunning and so. Let me take a deep breath
20:35
because I'm excited about this part.
20:37
And in so 2024 they released the Chr or .2022 and it's a hand
20:43
wound fly back chronograph with a permanently running central
20:48
seconds, a 30 minute counter and a power reserve.
20:51
It was limited to 62 pieces. The numbers were deliberately
20:54
chosen to honor 1962, the year that Dieter started his career
20:58
as a master watchmaker. And so the Chr 2022 is the brand
21:02
kind of making a statement. After 22 years of three handers
21:06
and dress your complications, they finally did something that
21:09
was kind of nuts. They did a chronograph and they
21:11
did it the Dornbluth way patented in house hand finishing
21:15
62 pieces total sold quietly to people who just happened to
21:19
know. So segment 5, let's talk about
21:21
the dial silver sublimated and hand heat blued.
21:25
So let me talk a little bit about these dials.
21:27
Dorm Bluth dials are, to my eye, some of the most beautiful and
21:31
distinctive dials in modern watchmaking.
21:34
Nothing against all of these other brands that are doing
21:36
remarkable work, Moser in particular, just stunning,
21:40
stunning work. And so I say this with the with
21:43
the utmost respect for all these other brands, no one's making
21:47
the dials in the way that Dorm Bluth is making them.
21:51
A typical Dorngluth dial is silver to brass.
21:54
It's not painted silver. It's not coated.
21:57
It's actually silvered, meaning that it's a chemical process
22:00
where pure silver is bonded to the surface of a brass dial,
22:04
blank by hand again in this workshop, that gives a dial A
22:08
particular kind of kind of warmth and this depth that
22:11
cannot be produced, I don't think, any other way.
22:14
And so as the silver ring ages, it develops A subtle character.
22:20
It's barely perceptible with these small variations from
22:23
light to shadow. And it's kind of the way that
22:25
these old chronometer dials used to look.
22:28
The numbers and the numerals and the markings are all typically
22:32
sublimated onto this silvered surface, meaning that there's
22:35
sometimes there's black numerals, you may see a black
22:38
track, you may see black sub dial circles.
22:42
And this contrast is very high. And sometimes they will carve
22:46
out the numerals only to fill them back in with, with paint.
22:51
Other times they may apply the numerals in black or with heat
22:55
blue numbers. And so again, you get this high
22:58
contrast that the legibility is. And I think that the keyword
23:02
here is just it's, it's honest. The dials are designed to be
23:06
read, not just admired. They function in a way that the
23:10
workshops instruments, if you were like on a ship, for
23:13
example, these instruments were supposed to function easy to
23:16
read and then move on to the next thing that you're supposed
23:18
to do. But then if you take a second
23:19
and look, they're just beautiful to look at.
23:22
And again, simple, the hands are heat blued.
23:26
Again, heat bluing is this traditional technique.
23:29
It's it's a finishing technique where this polished steel is
23:32
heated to about 300°C until the surface oxidizes and it produces
23:38
this deep gradient blue color. And it's one of the oldest and
23:43
most beautiful kind of hand finishing techniques in
23:45
horology. And most modern brands actually
23:48
kind of fake it. They hand paint their dials blue
23:51
or they use a chemical bluing that looks similar, but it lacks
23:54
depth in the way that the the heating does.
23:57
And so Dornbluth heats their hands.
24:00
They blew them in the old way again in Kalba by hand.
24:03
So this combination, this silver brass dial, these kind of
24:07
oversized small seconds, again, if you have one with the the
24:12
power reserve indicator heat blew hands.
24:15
They're they're so specific and they're so recognizable that
24:18
again, anyone that knows they will dorm recognize the dorm
24:20
booth from across the room and they don't look like anything
24:23
else quite like that on the market.
24:25
Now, when you get into marine chronometers, yes, absolutely.
24:28
They look very similar to others until you get a little bit
24:31
closer and you know, obviously they look very different from
24:34
the from the back end and the the the watchmaker side.
24:37
So the dials are again customizable.
24:40
Everything is customizable. If you order a door in booth,
24:42
you can within reason choose any dial color you want.
24:45
Your numeral styles, your hand styles, your sub dial layout.
24:48
You can make every single item to order.
24:50
There is no inventory. They they literally will build
24:53
your watch when you buy it. Try doing that with a
24:56
submariner. Right?
24:57
What color do you want? You want black segment 6, the
25:01
collection today, the Dorn Bluth collection today.
25:04
At a glance there's the 99 series.
25:06
It's a foundational line caliber 99 movement.
25:09
It's a 3 hander with small seconds right?
25:11
You have these different variants 99.1 point 2.3 dot Reg.
25:16
The regulator dial for itself is has an interesting layout as
25:20
well. They also have moon phase
25:22
variants and then 40mm. You can get them in hand wound.
25:25
You can get these classic dorm boots as well.
25:27
They also have different sizes of watches so 424038.5 and then
25:32
there's also some sneaky ones in there as well that are.
25:34
Really limited the. Quintus line launched in 2012
25:38
and built around this kind of in house.
25:40
Q 2010 caliber twin barrels, longer power reserve, a fully in
25:45
house movement. And this is kind of dorm Duluth
25:47
saying if you want it from the ground up, here it is.
25:51
And then there's Chr 2022 limited edition, this fly back
25:54
chronograph that they released in 2024 that no one talks about
25:57
62 pieces brands, most ambitious, I think complication
26:01
yet. And so there's a ton of limited
26:03
and I say ton there. There are limited editions with
26:06
specialists and retailers. There are traditionally it's
26:10
kind of small 20 or 30 piece runs that are done it with in
26:13
collaboration with some specific dealers that will carry dorm
26:16
booth. And again, total output you're
26:19
talking about somewhere between 120 and 180 watches per year.
26:23
You're literally saying 10-12, maybe 15 watches if they're
26:30
really hitting the gas per month.
26:32
Pricing for these starts in like the you can get in the four and
26:36
a half €1000 range and then they kind of work their way up from
26:39
there. So special editions and other
26:41
ones will be more expensive. Obviously in rare occasions you
26:44
will find like a 38.5mm gold or rose gold, but again, super
26:49
limited production runs on those as well.
26:51
And when you find them, they are, they can get pricey pretty
26:54
quickly again, because once people know, they know.
26:56
And it's not like you're finding, you're not having a
26:59
dorm booth come up and there are 50,000 people who want to buy
27:03
that watch. There are three or four or
27:05
10:00, but they know what they know.
27:07
And so as a result, they will compete with one another because
27:10
they know it's kind of like you're, you're in a small
27:13
auction house when these things come up.
27:14
It's pretty rare to actually see them come up on market.
27:17
You'll see 42mm somewhat regularly, but the 40's, the 38
27:22
point fives, anything smaller than that harder to find.
27:26
And so the watches are typically sold direct from Dornbluth and
27:29
they're through a small handful of specialist retailers around
27:32
the world. There's only one in the United
27:35
States, Watch buys UATCH and then BUYS Super good guys.
27:42
I've had great relationships with these guys, always willing
27:45
to just chat with you. But if you're looking for German
27:47
watches, Watch Buys is your your hub.
27:50
If you're in Australia, you can go to define watches and there's
27:52
a handful of others around the world, but there is no global
27:55
boutique network. There's not a flagship store,
27:57
there's no list of celebrity ambassadors, and there's really
28:00
no Instagram strategy to speak up.
28:01
So if you want a dorm Bluth, you find your way to one of these
28:04
retailers or you reach out to them or one of the dealers, or
28:06
you start to search Chrono 24 or eBay, or you look on Reddit.
28:10
Occasionally they will pop up. Or you can just go to the the
28:13
the workshop themselves and you can order it and they'll build
28:16
it and they'll ship it to you. That's kind of the entire
28:18
customer journey. You can also just reach out to
28:21
the guys that watch buys and, and go through the process with
28:24
them, right? And you can see what the queue
28:26
looks like about, you know, how long it would take for you to
28:28
get a custom built watch. Now segment 7, I'm going to talk
28:31
about this one that I don't think even deep Dornbluth folks
28:34
really know about. And I, I had an opportunity to
28:37
purchase one of these and I missed my chance.
28:40
And so I still kind of kick myself about that.
28:42
But I, I had this opportunity to pick up this, this one watch.
28:46
We're going to call segment 7. We're going to call it the
28:48
Jasmine Jasmin, the watch that kind of nobody talks about.
28:52
This is the hidden gem. OK, if you're deep in the rabbit
28:54
hole and you know, dorm Bluth, you may not even know this
28:58
watch. So now I'm going to tell you
28:59
something that I think even the dorm Bluth.
29:02
Folks like me that are kind of deep down the rabbit hole, they
29:05
don't. They may not even know about
29:06
this because Dormluth has this reputation for being subtle.
29:09
But even they have a piece that's so under the radar that
29:12
most of their collectors, even their own collectors don't know
29:16
that it exists. It's the Jasmine 09.0 Jasmin,
29:21
and it's actually Yasmine, the limited edition 75 pieces total.
29:27
They released it around 2009. Now, if you think when you're
29:30
listening to this now, you can go back to 2009 and think about
29:33
how the fact that people didn't even know Dormluth back then,
29:35
right? Somewhere in the 34mm range.
29:39
But it wears, I would argue larger than that, probably feels
29:43
on wrist. And again, I haven't even
29:44
handled one, but from when I've read, probably feels more like a
29:47
3536. And again, it has some presence,
29:49
obviously, because it's vertically a little bit taller
29:51
and again, significantly more compact than what Dormluth had
29:54
ever done before. So here's the thing.
29:56
It was technically marketed as a ladies watch and the brand named
30:00
it Yasmine after Dirk Dormluth youngest daughter, which is,
30:03
let's just acknowledge, one of the most genuinely sweet brand
30:06
names and kind of the decisions that you can make in horology.
30:09
The man named the smaller case after his kid.
30:13
But this is the part that makes it interesting.
30:16
The Yasmine is not a ladies watch in kind of the way that
30:19
the rest of the industry means that there's no diamond set
30:23
bezel, there's no mother of Pearl dial.
30:25
There's no softer or more intricate delicate execution.
30:28
The Yasmine has the same DNA as a 99 series silver brass style
30:34
heat blue hands marine chronometer aesthetic.
30:37
The you might be able to find one with an often open power
30:40
reserve right and some some configurations hand finished
30:44
movement robust on an austere and it's again, German
30:47
functionality is just smaller. So if you saw one on a wrist,
30:51
you would say, oh, you, you probably wouldn't argue that's a
30:54
ladies watch. You would just say, oh, that's a
30:55
dorm booth that I've never seen before.
30:57
And it looks great in that size because let's be honest, the
31:00
34mm watch with the right proportions is just, it's just
31:03
another watch, but this special. And so the bigger conversation
31:08
about this, I think might get into kind of gender, and I'm
31:11
happy to have conversations about that on a different,
31:13
different show. But Dorm Booth essentially
31:16
sidestep this entire thing by refusing to feminize the design.
31:20
They made a Yasmine. They just made it smaller with
31:24
the same bones and the same wearer can make the decision of
31:27
what watch they're going to get. So now the movement in the
31:29
Yasmine, this is where the story gets remarkable.
31:33
The dorm Bluth in house calibers, a unit toss base 99.
31:37
They're way too big to fit into a 34mm case.
31:40
And so Dirk had to actually source different movements.
31:43
And So what he did was he sourced with no exaggeration,
31:46
what I would again argue is one of the most beautiful provenance
31:50
stories I've ever come across in watchmaking.
31:53
The Yasmine runs on an ETA caliber 1120.
31:58
It's a hand wound movement. It's from the 1950s twenty 7mm
32:02
super slim. It's a vintage and it's no
32:04
longer in production. So now you're like, whoa, whoa.
32:06
Well, you just said they just sourced them.
32:08
So how did they find them? So Dirk actually sourced new old
32:12
stock examples of the 11:20 from where?
32:16
From the actual personal collection of helmet Zen.
32:20
Now, if you're like, whoa, whoa, Zen, like as in like Sinn, as in
32:24
sin a German watchmakers that make like the 556 and the one O
32:27
4. Yes, that helmet they're
32:30
buddies. Helmet Zen.
32:32
Well, they were helmet Zen is a legendary and was a legendary
32:36
watchmaker in Germany. The fighter pilot during World
32:40
War 2 founded the Zen watch company Yes again Zen Sinn, the
32:44
German pilot tool watch brand from 1961.
32:48
Personally, he this dude tested watches in ridiculously extreme
32:51
condition. He lived to 98 years old and he
32:54
was one of the great post war German watchmaking
32:57
entrepreneurs. And so Helmut Zen over the
32:59
decades, he built up this personal collection of new old
33:03
stock movements. Pristine, never used 1950s
33:08
calibers from various suppliers and he kept them in his own
33:11
personal archive. And so when Dirk needed a
33:14
vintage hand wound movement small enough to fit into the
33:16
Yasmine, he went to Helmut and he went to Zinn's collection and
33:21
guess what? He got them.
33:24
So here's where the Jasmine story.
33:26
And again, I'm going to go back and forth with Jasmine and
33:28
Yasmine. It's it's the the German versus
33:30
the American pronunciation. It is a Dornbluth finished
33:35
Dornbluth case hand built watch. It's running on a 1950s ETA
33:40
movement that came from Helmut Zinn's personal stockpile.
33:43
And the Providence of every single Yasmine movement traces
33:46
back to one of those most respected figures in the 20th
33:49
century. And specifically in German
33:52
watchmaking, 75 pieces total were ever made.
33:55
And that, by the way, is why the Yasmine can never be reissued.
33:59
The supply was finite. When the 1120s ran out, the
34:02
model ran out. They will never produce more
34:04
Yasmines, ever. So if you ever come across one,
34:08
don't do what I did on the secondary market and go, I don't
34:12
know if this is the right time, you know, blah, blah, blah,
34:14
right? They are hard to find.
34:16
They don't come up often, and when they do, again, they get
34:19
snapped up fast. And so that's why it's not just
34:22
this small dorm Bluth. It's a dorm Bluth running on a
34:25
helmet. Zen's movement right that has
34:27
history back to his archives. It's quietly one of the most
34:32
fascinating limited runs in modern German watchmaking.
34:35
And again, nobody. Talks about it.
34:38
And that again why is why so so much of respect from me goes to
34:42
Dorn Booth. They made one of the coolest
34:45
collector pieces in modern era. They named it.
34:48
After Dirk's daughter. And they didn't market it.
34:50
They didn't make a fuss about Helmut Zen's promenence.
34:53
I'm the dude making the fuss, right?
34:55
They just made it. They sold it to 75 people.
34:57
And then guess what? They just moved on to the next
34:59
thing. Segment 8.
35:00
Let's talk about why Dorn Booth matters.
35:03
So here's the obvious question. Why am I spending an entire
35:06
episode on a brand that makes 100 to like, you know, 150
35:09
watches a year that almost nobody knows about, that the
35:13
market itself doesn't really talk about, and that operates
35:16
out of a tiny village in eastern Germany?
35:19
Well, because I think Dornbluth is the OR.
35:22
A. Moral argument about watchmaking
35:25
itself and why what mark what watchmaking really is supposed
35:29
to be about. So stay with me for a second
35:31
here. Most of the watch industry, and
35:33
I include some brands I genuinely love in this.
35:37
They're structurally a commercial operation.
35:40
They make watches at scale, they market those watches at scale.
35:46
They build a brand, they build value.
35:49
They manage authorized dealer networks.
35:51
They optimize for secondary market performance.
35:54
They've reward shareholders. And none of this is bad.
35:58
It's it's how modern luxury businesses work.
36:01
This is what allows a great Swiss brand to keep, you know,
36:05
800 employees gainfully employed to fund research that produces
36:10
new escapements in geometry every couple of years, right?
36:14
But somewhere in that scale, something gets quieter.
36:19
The relationship between the watchmaker who actually built
36:21
your watch and the watch that ends up on your wrist becomes,
36:25
for very understandable reasons, abstract.
36:29
And the watchmaker doesn't know you.
36:31
You don't know the watchmaker. The watch is a product of a
36:35
system, not a person. Dornbluth is the opposite of
36:40
that, profoundly the opposite of that.
36:43
So when you buy a Dornbluth, your watch was built, in part or
36:48
in whole, by Dirk Dornbluth himself, or by one of the eight
36:53
or nine people who ate breakfast with him every that morning.
36:57
Dirk almost certainly inspected it.
36:59
He may have even He blued the hands on your watch.
37:02
He may have been the person who adjusted and regulated your
37:05
watch. The watch literally came from a
37:08
specific kitchen table workshop in a very specific village in
37:12
central Germany, built by a specific small team of people
37:16
who knew exactly what was going on to your wrist before they
37:20
assembled it. That's the kind of intimacy,
37:23
that's the kind of 1 watchmaker, one wear relationship that is
37:28
essentially extinct in modern luxury, but dorm Bluth keeps it
37:33
alive. Now, you're probably not going
37:35
to see a dorm Bluth on a celebrity.
37:38
You're probably not going to see a dorm Bluth on a professional
37:41
athlete or at a Netflix roast. When they do watch spotting,
37:47
that's not dorm Bluth target audience.
37:49
These are watches for enthusiasts that know watches
37:53
and watchmaking. It's a completely different
37:56
animal. The watches themselves embody
37:59
what I would consider this ethos.
38:01
They there's a slow beat rate, the marine chronometer dial up
38:06
the layout, the calm functional, no frills, no flash design, this
38:11
heat blued hand, the hand milled swan neck regulator, this car
38:18
axle inspired power reserve indicator on some of the
38:21
watches. None of these design choices are
38:23
trying to impress you. They're trying to honor the way
38:26
that watchmaking was done before any of this became a luxury
38:30
industry. Dornbluth is a watchmaker that
38:33
exists outside of the industry. They don't compete in it.
38:38
They don't compete and they don't comment on it.
38:41
They just keep doing what they're doing in Kalba with nine
38:43
people, one watch at a time, 150 or so watches per year,
38:49
hopefully forever. If Chopic is the charismatic
38:54
argument for independent watchmaking, and I love him,
38:57
Dorn Booth is the quiet one. Sorry.
39:00
You can hear my, my, my Pomeranian back there.
39:03
He's, he's coughing today. He's 115 outside today.
39:06
Can you believe that if Tropic is the charismatic argument for
39:11
independent watchmaking, Dorm Bluth is the Quiet 1?
39:16
And in some ways, the quiet argument is more persuasive to
39:19
me. Because you can't buy a Dorm
39:22
Bluth as a flex, almost nobody will recognize it.
39:25
There's no badge value. The only reason that you would
39:29
own a Dorm Bluth is because you understand what it is.
39:32
And that filter, that quiet internal filter that the brand
39:37
naturally creates between itself and the people who end up
39:41
wearing its watches is magic. These are watches for people who
39:45
don't need anyone else to validate the watches on their
39:48
wrist, which, when you think about it, is kind of the
39:50
relationship to a watch that almost everyone says that they
39:53
want but almost no one actually has.
39:57
All right, Segment 9. Let's talk about what's next.
40:01
Now for the next episode, we're going to go do something again
40:05
as we kind of change gears and continue to test the waters
40:07
here. We're going to do.
40:08
Something a little different. So we had two single brand deep
40:11
dives. We had Chopic and we had Dorn
40:13
Booth. And what I've noticed in editing
40:15
them and from what I've heard from folks in a few of the
40:19
messages is that something philosophical that's kind of
40:23
underneath both of these episodes and it's kind of
40:25
pulling a thread. And so as I've kind of heard,
40:28
and I've added this section in, the two brands are extreme cases
40:32
of something. They make watches that you don't
40:35
buy because you saw a celebrity wearing them.
40:38
You don't buy them because they're going to appreciate.
40:41
You don't buy them because they signal something to your
40:44
colleagues. You buy them because of what
40:47
they are, because the story connects to you in some way,
40:52
because of how they make you feel about yourself.
40:57
And that's a different category of buying than what most of the
41:01
watch market is actually about. And there is actually words for
41:06
these in two different categories.
41:08
And they go back 2400 years to Aristotle.
41:12
You're going to see this first word, hedonia or hedonia
41:17
HEDONIA. And this is pursuit of short
41:21
term pleasure, comfort, enjoyment.
41:24
It's the dopamine hit, the thing that feels great in the moment.
41:28
Hedonia is not bad, by the way. It's important, joy, real and
41:32
legitimate reason for doing something, including buying a
41:36
watch in studio. Underdog Watermelon we talked
41:38
about a few episodes ago. Pure hedonia.
41:42
That's a watch that you wear because it makes you smile.
41:45
And there is nothing wrong with that.
41:48
A healthy life has a lot of hedonia in it.
41:51
Second word is eudaimonia, and it's EUDAIMONIA.
41:59
Eudaimonia and it's deeper. It's about flourishing, meaning,
42:04
purpose, identity. Your pneumonia version of you is
42:07
the one that wears the watch your brother gave you.
42:11
Even if it's a quartz fashion watch.
42:14
It's the one that that wears the same Smith's Everest you held
42:19
your son with. It's the one that wears A dorm
42:21
Bluth on a quiet day because the watch in your wrist is who you
42:26
actually are, and it represents something about you, not you
42:32
trying to be someone else. And you don't need anyone else
42:35
to know that. So the next episode, we're going
42:38
to spend some time on these two ideas, Hedonia and Unimonia.
42:44
Now we're going to ask some questions here about why some
42:47
watches make you happy, why other watches make you you, and
42:52
you know, why A healthy collection I think has both of
42:55
those things. We're also going to talk a
42:57
little bit about why the trap of being only one or two if you get
43:02
stuck in either of those is going to mess you up pretty bad.
43:05
And what it actually looks like to build a collection that gives
43:08
you both the kind of joy immediately and then also across
43:12
the years. And it is, I think, the most
43:14
important conversation that we're going to have today.
43:16
So that's kind of coming up now. That is episode 9 of what's on
43:20
your restate. If you've never heard of Dorn
43:22
Booth before, well, hopefully you had because I talked about
43:24
him in other episodes. But if you've never heard of
43:27
them before, you're hopefully going to be going and Googling
43:31
them now. And that's kind of the exact
43:33
reason of why I made this episode.
43:35
They deserve to be on more wrists, not many more.
43:38
That's not how they work but but more the right ones.
43:41
So if you have a dorm booth, find me.
43:43
I want to hear what made you choose them.
43:46
Tell me your story. To Dirk and to Dieter.
43:48
Thank you for keeping the old ways alive.
43:51
This hobby is bigger because of you.
43:54
I'm watch Offski. Take care of yourselves and wear
43:56
something good. In cobbler, small and plain,
44:11
7500 names, brick dust on the morning air.
44:17
Half the town is standing there, only a handful, two or three,
44:22
and still so carefully old hands, steady, short and slow,
44:27
making time from a fading glow. Handmade, handmade, handmade.
44:35
Beautiful, honest, handmade. Turn by turn, they keep it true.
44:46
Cobble, this is what you do. Watch glass and the light tiny
45:04
springs in the wind tonight. No light boast, no showy sign,
45:09
just the watch with the disciplined spine.
45:12
And when it leaves that narrow room, it carries dust and warmth
45:17
and broom. Traditional wand in the grain, a
45:20
small town's hard inside the frame.
45:25
Handmade, handmade. Handmade.
45:27
Dutiful artist, handmade turn my turn.
45:35
They keep it true Cover. This is what you do.