We caught up with Nicolas Gong, Managing Director for A. Lange & Söhne Asia Pacific several weeks ago at their 2024 Novelty Showcase in Sydney and spoke to him about the brand, its iconic pieces and what makes A. Lange & Söhne so special!
This article was written in partnership with A. Lange & Söhne
A. Lange & Söhne is a unique watch brand. There are very few, if any watch brands that have such a rich history going back to their founder, disappeared for 40 years and then been able to be re-vitalised with such success. But this is the story of A. Lange & Söhne, which fell victim to the effects of World War II, nationalization and the separation of Germany via the Berlin Wall until it was taken down in 1989. However, thanks to Walter Lange, the son of Rudolf Lange, grandson of Emil and great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange (A. Lange & Söhne’s founder) it was brought back to life in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years later, in 1994, it would produce its first commercial piece – The Lange 1, and the rest, as they say, is history, or in our case, another story for another day!
The beauty of A. Lange & Söhne is that while the brand was brought back after 42 years, the goal of Walter Lange was to not just revive the brand in name, but also its heritage, know-how, spirit and the magnificent art of German Watchmaking. He wanted to pay tribute to his family who started the business and kept the family business going until 1948, and when you look closely at a piece from A. Lange & Söhne, you can see this in full detail through the caseback, the dials and case finishing.
Several weeks ago, A. Lange & Söhne held their 2024 Novelty showcase in Sydney, and Champs and I headed down to see all the pieces in person, some of which we had already had the pleasure of getting hands-on with during Watches & Wonders 2024, but also to catch up with Nicolas Gong, Managing Director for A. Lange & Söhne Asia Pacific to talk to him about what the brand meant to him, to its customers and where A. Lange & Söhne is heading.
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Nicolas is no newbie when it comes to watches or the luxury industry. Born in and raised in Shanghai, Nicoals moved to France to do a Master’s Degree, before landing a job at Louis Vuitton as the Assistant Merchandising Manager – Fine Jewelry and Watches. After several years working with LV and brands like Swarovski and ENZO, he made the jump to A. Lange & Söhne in 2019 as the Managing Director for China.
“I started at A. Lange & Söhne in 2019 in China, where I was responsible for the Chinese market, and then moved to Hong Kong to be responsible for the whole Asia Pacific. This means I now look after four markets: China, North East Asia, Southeast Asia (Australia and New Zealand being a part of this region) and Korea. So day-to-day we are heavily involved in managing the retail network, consolidating and expanding this network, and developing the retail footprint. In addition to this, we are heavily focused on customer engagement for A. Lange & Söhne to help drive brand growth.”
Interestingly, even though Nicolas wasn’t solely focused on one single brand at the start of his career, he singled out A. Lange & Söhne as a choice for his next move for very similar reasons many collectors do – what the brand stands for and its history, both past and recent.
“If you look at my experience, it’s not typically like other watch professionals, but what attracted me to A. Lange & Söhne is that it fits into my aspirations of a brand that I wanted to work for. For me, the brand in terms of heritage, strong products that differentiate it from the others, and also lots of potential were key. What I mean by that is, that there are lots of things about the brand we can and are able to communicate, educate and build with clients. Not only this, but it’s a very interesting brand in terms of how it has developed. From the founder to the second generation through to the fourth generation who brought back the brand, it is very unique because no brand has disappeared for 40 years and then been re-established again!”
When you hear Nicolas talk about A. Lange & Söhne the way he does, coming from an outsider’s perspective while working in the industry, his desire to work for the brand for the reasons that many people say they like and originally get into A. Lange & Söhne are one and the same. The only difference is, that Nicolas gets to live and breathe it all day, and in his role, can help to shape the direction of the brand throughout Asia and the Pacific.
For those not aware, A.Lange & Söhne are not a mass manufacture brand. Unlike other brands on the market, they produce a relatively small number of pieces each year in comparison to the likes of brands such as Omega or Rolex, who make somewhere in the vicinity of 1M pieces a year. Even slightly smaller Swiss brands will make hundreds of thousands of watches a year, and when it comes to the likes of the high-end players like Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet, they are producing the realm of 40,000 – 60,000 pieces a year. A. Lange & Söhne are making around 5,000 pieces a year. Nicolas tells us why this is the case and why it matters:
“For me, what is important is that A. Lange & Söhne stands for a very unique watch-making philosophy. The quantity is decided by this philosophy, the craftsmanship, and the double assembly that we require, so it’s not that we want to control the supply to 5000 pieces, it’s the time it takes to design, develop and also the servicing. This is something that is quite unique to our brand.”
And how can we talk about A. Lange & Söhne without mentioning their epic finishing on the movements, not to mention the rest of the watch? Even the most basic or simple (and I use that term loosely) A. Lange & Söhne is done to standards that are better than other larger brands’ most exquisitely finished watches. Glashütte watch-making has always been about this, and Lange leads the way.
“Finishing is definitely part of the watch-making philosophy for A. Lange & Söhne. As an example, if you take any of our watches, even the very simple watches, like a simple two hands, it has the same finishing, same skills used, same double assembly, so that’s what actually makes the brand very unique.”
While many watch brands will finish only the visible parts, Lange does the parts that are not visible to the eye through the case back as well. Essentially, if you pulled the movement out, took the bridges off and started to disassemble it, you’ll see the finish on all the parts, even those buried deep within the movement itself.
“If we remove the finishing on the invisible parts you can easily increase the quantity (of watches made). If we removed the double assembly, we can easily double the number of pieces, but that is part of the history, part of the DNA and it’s part of the overall positioning and perception of the brand.”
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Nicolas mentions the double assembly here, which is not something that you see every day with most watch brands. Effectively, each watch A. Lange & Söhne makes is put together and tested twice. Once all the components have been made, finished, quality control tested etc, the movement is put together and assembled into the case of the watch and tolerance tested. It’s then disassembled piece by piece completely, then assembled again, and tested to ensure that it works as it should, and is as accurate and done to the exacting standards. It’s impressive to think that a brand still does this nowadays when time is money, there are quotas to hit, and sales targets to achieve.
The other aspect of A. Lange & Söhne that impresses us is their attention and focus on movement development. For a brand that is only 30 years old (in its second lease on life), they’ve been busy developing and innovating with its movements and mechanisms, something you can see if you visit the Sydney boutique with the Wall of Movements.
“A. Lange & Söhne spend lots of time on the watch movements that they develop. From 1994 until now, there are already 73 in-house movements and each year you will see new things coming out. It’s not easy to do when you’re talking about a quantity of 5000 pieces, and why we spend so much time and energy in terms of creating new movements.”
When it comes to A. Lange & Söhne, perhaps their most iconic piece is the Lange 1. This is not by accident as it was the piece the brand launched back in 1994 to bring it back to life and signal to the watch world, “We’re Back!” Nicolas gives us a little more insight into this, and from his perspective, why this piece is a modern-day icon.
“It’s the first watch that we launched and part of the first collection we launched. For me, it was a striking launch because basically A. Lange & Söhne disappeared for 40 years and up to that point, no one had seen anything contemporary from the brand, so it’s the start of contemporary watchmaking for us. It was really unique at the time because if you look through the Lange 1, you have the outside state, which is inspired by the 5-minute clock (talking about the large date window), and you have all the details behind the watch, meaning the movements. You have the hand polishing, you have the three-quarter plates, a signature of German watchmaking and A. Lange & Söhne. It’s everything related to the Lange history.”
“The other aspect of the Lange 1 is, it allows us to extend the range into different functions. So if have the time zone, you make the two dials with different time zones, if you make the perpetual calendar, you have very creative elements, like the ring on the dial. As you can see, it’s very extensive and you can do a lot of complications within this collection, which also makes it iconic to some extent.”
When you look at the Lange 1, it is easy to see how these pieces became a success for the brand. Outside of being a very good-looking watch, the way the information is displayed on the dial, the oversized date, and the asymmetrical dial design make it conducive to additional functions and displays, and as Nicolas says, the movements that are beautifully decorated underneath which are a hallmark of A. Lange & Söhne.
After all this talk about the beauty that are A. Lange & Söhne watches, we wanted to delve a little into the business side of Nicolas’s world, and how he has seen the industry and the brand change over the last five years or so, and he sites several factors, and curiously, it isn’t all down to hard work and strategy. Like all brands, Covid played a massive part in its popularity, but while this helped it, the challenge is to continue this momentum.
“I think the biggest change I’ve experienced is really in the past five years because I joined right before Covid. At that time, A. Lange & Söhne was still quite a niche brand because lots of people didn’t really understand what the brand was, mostly because it was only re-established in 1994 and is only 30 years old. But in the last five years, especially after Covid, we experienced a quick growth in terms of awareness because everyone wasn’t able to travel. They really had the time to appreciate watches and research them, and added to this, you saw the second-hand market and watch auctions become a hot topic.”
However, we’re now at the back end of 2024, and it would seem that Covid is well and truly over in terms of the Pandemic, as a result, the watch markets have come off the high that was 2021 and the start of 2022. We delve into this a little further with Nicolas and how he has seen the industry play out across different markets from his perspective:
“Now over the past two years, the market has really become normalised, it is going back to pre-covid in terms of monetary values, also, with people’s studies and travel etc they have more options in terms of experiences outside of watches which has helped to normalise the secondary prices again, which in turn impacts the brands at a retail level and happens on a market by market basis.”
“There’s a kind of similarity across the markets because even though Covid had different phases in different markets, such as China going through it first, getting back to business and being normalised before the others, it then went back into lock-down again after a couple of years when the other markets were back to normal. Now, there are more similarities in markets due to the economic situation – lots of uncertainty is impacting all corners of the world. It is not only in China or the US, but it’s also impacting Asia for example as well. Japan has possibly benefited from the depreciation of the exchange rate so it’s seeing a consumption increase but everything will normalise according to the general economic trends.”
This is one aspect of being part of an international brand, in an industry that spans the globe. Nothing is ever the same in all markets at the same time. If it is, like what we have seen with global inflation, this just adds another layer of complexity to the difficulties of navigating different markets, different consumer trends in each market, consumption habits not to mention things like exchange rates and supply constraints on top of this.
“I think for A. Lange & Söhne, the challenge is the supply because we never increase the number of watches made because of the watch-making philosophy that comes from the brand’s heritage. Even though we have lots of watchmakers, increasing the quantity is not possible. This challenge makes us more resilient in terms of a business model – yes we build up our business on a limited quantity (of watches), but this also means limited customers. The impact of this is we need to get to know these customers very well, engage with them and also expand the community gradually.”
A. Lange & Söhne, it would seem, are taking a measured approach to how they go about reaching potential new customers as well as engaging with and nurturing existing customers. We wanted to see how this approach resonates here in Australia, and if we, as a maturing watch market, are open to this, or more importantly, how well this works in a smaller market like Australia.
“So for Australia I think, even though it’s only the first visit for me, it’s actually a very interesting market because it’s also quite new to some extent at the stage of knowing A. Lange & Söhne. So when I see people at events, or come to our store, they really want to understand the brand more, so I think there’s still a lot of potential and lots of communicating about A. Lange & Söhne to be done with our customers here.”
“Meanwhile, there are lots of watch collectors, I met a few already, they’re into collecting and they know all the brands, they collect a lot of pieces, and these customers also travel a lot, so they experience a lot of brands. For this reason, I think it is quite similar to some new markets, meaning there’s a customer set who are professional and knowledgeable, but there is a very big potential in terms of new customers who we want to get to know.”
Being part of the watch community, we mirror this sentiment as it is how we see it. Overall, the Australian watch scene is slowly maturing and while the larger mass brands have traditionally done very well here, there are more and more people who are starting to open up to brands that are smaller in production size, or more independent with a higher level of craftsmanship. While I realise that A. Lange & Söhne is owned by Richemont, the feeling we get talking to Nicolas and others working in Lange is they run a lot more like an independent, which is important for a brand like A. Lange & Söhne. this being said, what’s next for the brands out here and what are they planning?
“If you look at A. Lange & Söhne, it is actually a very reserved brand and conservatively run as well. We don’t like to communicate en mass through publishing and advertising, but rather through more personal ways and touch points in terms of engagement. So, through great events and even online, we can also do something really intimate in terms of communicating to potential and existing clients.”
While we won’t expect to see A. Lange & Söhne billboards plastered all over our capital cities, it seems that we can expect to see a few more localised and intimate events around the place for people to get to know the brand better, and even though production is limited, hopefully, access to more pieces more often as the popularity keep rising. If the last event with the exclusive and sold-out novelties is anything to go by, then the brand is well on its way!
This article was written as part of a commercial partnership with A. Lange & Söhne. Watch Advice has commercial partners that work with us, however, we will never alter our editorial opinion on the pieces or the brand, a fact that is clearly communicated to the brands when entering into a commercial arrangement.
