Schaumburg Watch

Since 1998, Schaumburg Watch has been creating stubborn and extraordinary chronographs and chronometers in the Schaumburg region of the Weser Renaissance in Lower Saxony, Germany.

The brand deliberately eludes quantitative classifications, retaining an uncompromising claim to the highest quality regardless of production figures or the size of the model range — an genuine insider tip among watch collectors. The manufactory produces movement parts, blanks, and bridges by in-house CNC machining, then finishes everything by hand: hand engraving, hand skeletonization, microblasting, electroplating, patinating, and thermal surface colouring of metals. Custom dials are fabricated from brass, silver, gold, copper, and Damascus steel. Schaumburg Watch is one of very few European watch manufacturers able to perform water resistance and pressure tests up to 600 bar / 6,000 metres — a testing service offered to other brands. Also under the group umbrella: the Martin Braun brand, HREPET, and NauticFish. Leather straps are produced in-house under the Schaumbird label. Regular watchmaking seminars allow participants — without any prior knowledge — to build their own watch under expert guidance. Development of new ideas and their technical implementation are the defining focus.

Among the group's most storied lineages is the Martin Braun collaboration, revived under the Schaumburg roof since 2022. Braun began developing the EOS in 1995, spending a full year calculating sunrise and sunset times and writing the computer program needed to translate them into a mechanical display, before unveiling the finished watch in the autumn of 2000 to considerable acclaim and several professional awards; he brought it to Basel for the first time the following year, by which point the workload had already forced him to hire his first employee. Braun went on to work within the Franck Muller Group and later founded the Antoine Martin brand, and today lives and designs from Sarnen, Switzerland, while Schaumburg produces his astronomical watches with what the brand describes as respect for the original ideas rather than reinvention — elegant, precise pieces that, in the words of one retailer, still seem to genuinely talk to the sky. The seminar programme Braun started in 1998, inviting anyone curious about movement complications to attend and learn, continues today under Schaumburg's own name, drawing participants from around the world with no prior watchmaking knowledge required. From a testing lab capable of certifying watches to 600 bar for other manufacturers, to a seminar room where beginners build their first movement, to the quiet continuation of one of Germany's most technically serious astronomical complications, Schaumburg Watch operates as something closer to a working guild than a conventional brand.

A newer addition to that same family is HREPET, launched under its own name and dedicated microsite but built, marketed, and sold entirely through Schaumburg's own shop. Where full sonnerie or quarter-repeater mechanisms chime repeatedly and can feel intrusive in daily wear, HREPET's Caliber HRP-01 — a modified automatic movement, 28,800vph, 42 hours of reserve, 24 jewels — strikes just once, automatically, on the full hour: a single tuned hammer against a specially calibrated gong, silenceable at will via a pusher at 4 o'clock without affecting timekeeping. The partially open dial lets the hammer and gong mechanism itself remain visible. The collection is built around two families of ten models each: Pura, showing hours and minutes alongside the repeater, and Resonanz, which adds a central seconds hand; both are cased in 42mm steel with a double-sided black ceramic inlay, a domed sapphire crystal, 5 ATM water resistance, and a genuine leather strap from RIOS Augsburg.

Alongside the astronomical work carried out for Martin Braun, Schaumburg has developed its own line of Grand Complications, anchored by the SolSequor Multiversum. Rather than a moonphase, its astronomical module calculates and displays the sunrise and sunset times for the wearer's own geographic coordinates, individually set at the time of purchase; every dial, hand, and cam is thermally patinated and coloured by hand, so that no two examples come out quite the same. Cased in 43mm polished and brushed steel with 50 metres of water resistance, it runs on a modified automatic Sellita SW-11 base with 31 jewels and 42 hours of reserve, finished with rhodium-plated perlage and a Côtes de Genève rotor, priced at 5,645 euros. It sits alongside the brand's existing Grand Perpetual MooN as one of two complications built on the same in-house astronomical-module expertise.