A video interview in lockdown has a decisive advantage if the interviewee is a designer in the home office: You get an impression of the objects with which someone like Thomas Höhnel himself lives.
So take a closer look.
What is there colorful lying around in the background?
New designs?
“No, then I would be extremely rich,” says Thomas Höhnel from his kitchen table and laughs.
“It's Lego, a little messy.” Thomas Höhnel also takes a closer look.
That's his job.
He looks at the clock.
When you think of watchmaking, you usually end up quickly in small mountain villages in Switzerland or in Glashütte.
Or he has the image of a celebrity advertising a watch for a campaign.
Jennifer Wiebking
Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Follow I follow
Perhaps he has heard of one of the famous designers who design clocks on a project basis and then sofas or doorknobs in the next job for other brands.
The watch brand Nomos also commits such big names for its models, for example Mark Braun or Werner Aisslinger.
But she also treats herself to someone like Höhnel.
Thomas Höhnel, like the stars and watchmakers, shapes the image of a brand - in his own way.
The product design team watches over the typical Nomos design, and Höhnel is one of them.
What significance it has is clear when you look at who wears Nomos on their wrist: collectors who are convinced of the mechanical watches with their clear lines;
and people who without Nomos might not have a watch at all and wear it like a design object.
"I wasn't always a watch nerd"
The writer Gary Shteyngart, a self-proclaimed watch nerd, described this a few years ago in the magazine “New Yorker”: “These watches don't sell to the top one percent, but to the creative classes. 'When a journalist starts to make a career,' a German friend told me, 'he'll get himself a Nomos.' "Höhnel says:" I wasn't always a watch nerd. "It only began with Nomos. He first studied design at the University of the Arts in Berlin and then worked as a graphic designer for a start-up, System 180. There, the focus was on exhibition construction systems and the furnishing of offices. At some point Zara Home knocked on the Berlin company with an order for 120 stores a year.
Höhnel worked on renderings and visualized facilities for a number of years.
At some point he wanted to continue and talked to a friend about Nomos Glashütte.
The placemark in the name can easily mislead designers who are looking for something new and for whom Berlin is their natural habitat.
“I didn't know that Nomos also had people in Berlin,” says Höhnel.
He came across an advertisement, and a short time later he was already at Nomos, doing a test job.
Or more precisely at Berlinerblau, Nomos' design office in Berlin.
What is possible?
From the dimensions of an international branch network for a Spanish discounter, Höhnel now had to mentally reduce his work to 35 millimeters in diameter and 6.2 millimeters in height, with handcraft made in Glashütte in between. These are the dates of the tangent, and one of Höhnel's first tasks back then, in 2011, was to design a special model for the Wempe boutique in New York. It was good practice to get to understand the brand, to get used to the design language. “Simple, reserved, understated, geometric,” says the forty-eight year old. “But never boring.