Sternglas is a Hamburg brand that makes Bauhaus-style watches, founded by Dustin Fontaine and run as Sternglas GmbH from Gerhofstrasse, in the middle of the city. The story he tells is a simple one: at sixteen he worked part-time in a small watch manufactory in Münster, changing straps and stocking shelves, and came out of it hooked on classic watches he could not afford. The question that followed him — why is there nothing with clean, timeless design at a price a student can reach — turned into years of sketching and discarding designs, then a decision at the start of 2016 to stop second-guessing it. That October he put his first watch on Kickstarter and raised 16,000 euros for the initial batch. The house is now a team of fifteen, its watches sell through more than 450 retailers from London to Las Vegas and Prague to Ho Chi Minh City, and the German second word on the logo, Zeitmesser, still says what the brand is after: a timekeeper, not a trinket.

The range is deliberately readable. Naos is the core family and the best seller: 38 mm in polished 316L steel, double-domed sapphire with anti-reflective coating and 5 ATM, at 229 euros in quartz and 429 with a Miyota 8215 automatic, plus a Moonphase version at 299 and a Bauhaus X automatic special edition at 499. The Hamburg line runs a mecha-quartz chronograph at 349 and a solar quartz at 329, with the Hamburg Pro automatic built on the Miyota 9015 and an Edition Küste automatic at 499. Berlin is the dressier automatic, and Marus 2.0 is the outlier — a 42 mm brushed and polished steel diver good to 20 bar, made in limited coastal editions. Above them sits the Naos Pro Edition Tuxberg at 699 euros, and a titanium Naos Solar at 349. Prices across the catalogue run from roughly 229 to 699 euros.

The brand designs in Hamburg, sells direct and through jewellers, and backs everything with a two-year international warranty, free worldwide shipping and an in-house repair service. It also makes wall clocks and its own straps.