A native of Eichstatt, Germany, Christine Hutter trained as a watchmaker in Munich before embarking on a career that would take her across the Swiss and German horological landscapes. It was during a stint in Glashütte, the cradle of German watchmaking—which included time with the brands A. Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original—that she rediscovered a certain Carl Moritz Grossmann. Largely forgotten, Moritz Grossmann was a prominent watchmaker and educator in the late 19th century—and with this discovery, Hutter began dreaming big. In 2008, she succeeded in acquiring the rights to the name and set out to helm her own brand. Today, she is the CEO of Grossman Uhren GmbH. “It was like a mission came up. As a passionate watchmaker, you have the feeling to do something more,” she explains. “It was clear for me that to restart Moritz Grossmann, I had to go back to Glashütte, and I had a vision in my mind: we had to be a real manufacture, to construct and develop the movements ourselves.”
The modern era of Moritz Grossmann began as little more than a mailing address and an office that was Hutter’s kitchen table, but quickly grew. In 2010, the brand released its first watch, and in 2012 moved into its new manufacture building in Glashütte. In the years since, it has become known for its traditional techniques, quirky but functional innovations, and an extreme attention to finishing. It has also already released 16 in-house calibres and holds 20 patents. “Fifteen years seems like a long time, but it’s not a long time,” Hutter notes, pointing out that Moritz Grossmann movements are almost completely conventional and typically have a total development time of several years.
“We are a German brand, so we are different from the Swiss brands. I think we keep all German standards or Glashütte standards. And we are perhaps different—if you look at the style of our movements and the finishing, we do everything in a very classic and traditional way. Not everybody’s doing it,” Hutter explains. The calibres her company has developed indeed have a very traditional, almost pocket watch approach—untreated German silver as a material, 18,000vph frequency, and a two-thirds plate construction that is more challenging to assemble. “We look for the functionality and stability of the movement. That’s perhaps also the reason why we do not produce very slim movements,” she adds. “It’s a different style, but we are used to producing our movements and it is working very well. We do not have a lot of watches that come back for [premature] servicing.”
Moritz Grossmann movements are also filled with little innovations—ones that cater to functional improvements. Balance wheels, for example, are designed to be optimal for adjustment. The manufacture has its own setting system—pulling the crown out will stop the watch and allow it to be set, but it is restarted with a separate pusher. This makes the overall time-setting process more precise, as it eliminates the minute hand flutter that can occur in a conventional system where the movement is restarted with the crown.
In terms of ambition and innovative design, the Benu Tourbillon is an exemplar. It has a flying three-minute tourbillon with a rarely-seen stop-seconds function. When triggered, the movement of the tourbillon carriage is arrested by the use of a tiny brush—one made from human hair, no less, as it was found that artificial hairs did not sufficiently return to their original shape. In fact, Hutter’s own hair was used in the original run. “We try to be classic, but also innovative,” she says.
Finishing is also a point of pride. “If you look with an eyepiece at our ratchet or crown wheel, you can see that we polish between the teeth,” Hutter says. She relates a story of when Philippe Dufour, one of the modern masters of watchmaking and who practices a similar technique, visited her manufacture. “He said to me, ‘Christine, you know, nobody else is doing this kind of finishing,’” she recalls.
Although Hutter does not hold the rest of the watch to quite the same in-house standards as the movements, the manufacture does make a few of its own dials, and produces its own hands as well. The hands are of particular fascination—extremely delicate and thin, and annealed to a brown-violet hue that has to be achieved in smaller windows than the typical heat-treated blue hands.
Moritz Grossmann today consists of about 50 people, around 30 of whom are watchmakers—plus one, of course, which is herself. As CEO, Hutter does very little hands-on watchmaking these days, but her experience at the bench has governed her leadership style—from finding the talented craftspeople who can fulfil her exacting standards, to training them and conversing about their work. “I think for me it’s good, because I can talk with all the production people at their level,” she says. “If something is happening, they know they can come to me and I will understand what’s happening.
“Grossman wrote a book in 1860,” Hutter continues. “The title was The Construction Of A Simple But Mechanically Perfected Watch. And that’s more or less our philosophy. It looks simple, perhaps classic in design, but inside is also mechanical perfection. It’s what we try to do.”
