Over the years, my feelings about Nomos have become more and more complex. Like many enthusiasts, the brand was an early discovery on the forums, and felt like an insider’s secret of sorts. Here was a small firm based in the historic German watchmaking community of Glashitte making interesting, immediately identifiable watches with in-house components at an approachable price point – Nomos felt like the primary counter example to the purists who insisted you had to spend well into the five figures for real watchmaking. In recent years, the brand has grown considerably, radically expanding their catalog to include a variety of sportier references in larger sizes, as well as widely proliferating their excellent ultra thin automatic in-house movement throughout their collection.
Watches made by Nomos are objectively good. They are well designed, attractive, colorful (or not) and made to exacting standards that ensure they can be treated like the heirlooms the brand has always implied they are through the suggestion that engraving an important message on the caseback is part of the Nomos experience. But Nomos, in comparison with other brands most would identify as their peers, have been treading water in terms of the introduction of new products. Is that a fair criticism? It might not be. After all, if a Nomos (or any watch) is meant to be a purchase that stays with the owner (or the eventual recipient) for decades, constantly releasing new watches to keep up with a manufactured media cycle is silly. But still, as someone who has always felt a connection to the brand and is, for better or worse, caught up in that cycle, I desperately want to see them innovate and come up with genuinely new ideas that go beyond new colorways and case sizes.
And that brings us the Club Sport Neomatik 34, the latest release from the brand and what we assume will be their final new watch of 2024. You can probably tell exactly what this is from the name of the watch: a new edition of their popular Club Sport model, conceived as a Nomos with a sporty, daily wear vibe that is genuinely robust, in a smaller case meant to be a true unisex size. It joins existing Club Sport models in 37mm, 39mm, and 42mm, but even though it’s the smallest one yet, it doesn’t lose any of the robust qualities the Club Sport is known for – this is still a 200 meter water resistant watch, and it comes on the brand’s Oyster-style three-link bracelet. Three dial colors are available at launch: rosé, gold, and purple.
Stepping back a bit and seeing the entirety of the Club Sport lineup, it’s easy to see this watch as Nomos’s answer to the Rolex Datejust. Or, to be more precise, it feels like their answer to the Datejust in the 1950s and 60s, well before that watch was purely a luxury object. These watches are simple, easy to wear, and good looking without being ostentatious. While the purple dial might not exactly fly under the radar, the gold and rosé certainly do, and the 34mm size feels like it’s in direct conversation with the classic Datejust footprint. Remember, Nomos sizing is often deceiving: because of the brand’s penchant for long lugs, you’re safe in adding about 2mm to the stated size of almost any Nomos to get a sense of how it will actually behave on the wrist.
At the heart of these watches is the DUW3001, the incredibly thin automatic movement that Nomos has been using to great effect for years. The movement itself is just 3.2mm thin, which translates to a case height of a hair over 8mm. The development of this movement by Nomos is really their key success over the past decade, as it allows their automatic watches (which any brand will tell you are inherently more commercial than their manually wound counterparts) to maintain the same slender proportions that made Nomos so popular in the first place, when all they had were hand wound calibers.
The Club Sport Neomatik 34, then, is not a particularly exciting release in the sense that it is, quite literally, yet another size. But it illustrates a certain consistency on the part of Nomos, as well as a clarity of vision, that many brands lack. That might be more worthwhile to many potential consumers than something that can be loaded directly onto the hype train.
The retail price of the new Club Sport Neomatik 34 is $3,060. Nomos
