Carlo Lasch

Carlo Lasch is a young independent watchmaker based in Chemnitz, in the German state of Saxony — a region with deep historical ties to German watch and clock manufacturing through nearby Glashütte, though Chemnitz itself has no established watchmaking tradition of its own. Lasch designs and builds his watches entirely by himself, a fact he states plainly: every piece he wears and creates has been developed by his own hand from initial design through to the final screw. Speaking to regional newspaper Freie Presse in October 2025, Lasch described his approach to the craft in terms that emphasise patience and attention to the smallest details above all else: 'Die Details sind sehr wichtig und da muss man viel Geduld mitbringen' — 'the details are very important, and you need to bring a lot of patience to it.' That patience extends to his method of self-education: rather than relying solely on formal training, Lasch has travelled to different countries specifically to visit and learn from other watchmakers, observing that every workshop operates differently — 'jede Werkstatt ist anders – jeder hat eigene Techniken und Tricks' — each with its own techniques and tricks worth absorbing.

Lasch's own watch design, the piece he wears on his own wrist in the Freie Presse feature, was born from an accumulation of ideas he felt compelled to bring into physical form: 'Ich hatte viele Ideen – und den Drang, sie Wirklichkeit werden zu lassen' — 'I had many ideas, and the urge to make them a reality.' That description of turning a backlog of personal design concepts into a single realised watch, built start to finish by his own hand, situates Lasch within the broader story the Freie Presse article frames him within: a wider revival of interest in analogue, mechanical watches among younger people, drawn to style and traditional craft as a deliberate counterpoint to smartwatches and digital technology. Lasch himself has expressed a striking ambition for his hometown, framing his personal project as potentially historic for the city: as the article's own title quotes him directly, 'Ich glaube, ich gründe die erste Uhrenmanufaktur in Chemnitz' — 'I believe I am founding the first watch manufacture in Chemnitz.' A design and motion-graphics credit from 2021 lists a project titled 'Lacadi' as manufactured by Carlo Lasch, suggesting his watchmaking practice under his own name extends back several years prior to the press attention that followed.

As of the press attention in late 2025, Lasch's operation remains at the earliest and most personal stage of independent watchmaking: there is no commercial website and no published catalogue or price list — the workshop communicates through his Instagram account, while international watch-brand registries have begun recording his output under the marque 'C.Lasch.' The timing of his emergence carries a certain symbolic weight: the Freie Presse profile appeared in October 2025, the very year Chemnitz held the title of European Capital of Culture — a programme dedicated in large part to surfacing the city's overlooked makers and creative traditions — and Lasch's declared ambition to found the city's first watch manufacture lands against a distinctive industrial backdrop. Nineteenth-century Chemnitz was known as the 'Saxon Manchester,' one of Germany's great centres of machine-tool and textile-machinery building — an engineering culture adjacent to, but never overlapping with, the fine watchmaking concentrated an hour away in Glashütte. Should Lasch succeed in scaling his one-man practice into a true manufacture, he would be grafting haute horlogerie onto a city with a formidable precision-engineering heritage but no horological lineage of its own, making him, in effect, both the founder and the entire first generation of a Chemnitz watchmaking tradition. For now, his production consists of unique, self-built pieces created entirely by his own hands and available on inquiry.