Four watchmakers. One bench each. Fewer than sixty mechanical watches leave this workshop in a year — because sixty is the honest limit of what four hands can finish without hurrying.
A watch made this way is a decision, not a product. We refused to grow into a brand.
Vollmer began when Anselm Vollmer left a large manufacture in Glashütte, tired of movements finished to a schedule rather than to a standard. He wanted to bevel every bridge by hand, to black-polish a steel part until it read as a pool of ink, and to sign only what he had truly made.
Twenty years later the answer to “how many?” has never changed. Enough to live from. Few enough to hold to. Sixty is not scarcity as strategy — it is the number four people can finish while still sleeping at night.
We keep four. Each stays in the catalogue for years — a watch you can grow old beside, serviced by the same hands that built it.
Turn a Vollmer over and you see where the months go. The bridges are hand-bevelled to a mirror edge — an anglage cut and polished by hand, catching light like a folded ribbon. There is no machine that does this the way we mean it.
Black polish is our signature and our discipline. A steel part is worked against a tin plate with diamond paste until, at the right angle, it reflects nothing — a surface so flat it reads pure black. Get it wrong and you start the part again.
No department, no line. Each watch is assembled and finished by one person from the first bridge to the final regulation — and signed by them.
There is no priority tier and no way to pay to skip ahead. When you join, we tell you the true number.
A letter, not a form. We reply personally, usually within a week, and answer every question you have.
Before anything is agreed, you see the reference in the metal. No deposit changes hands until you have held it.
A deposit of 20% holds your place. We give you the honest waiting time — today, between eleven and thirty-four months by reference.
Once your watch reaches the bench, you receive photographs at each stage. It is finished when it is right, not when it is due.
Every Vollmer returns to the same bench, free of any labour charge, for the working life of the watch — and beyond, into the hands of whoever inherits it. We keep the parts. We keep the records. We keep the promise. A watch made to last a century deserves a workshop that intends to be there.
We answer every letter ourselves. There is no wrong question, and no obligation in asking it.