Barely six months have passed since the NOMOS Glashütte Club Sport neomatik World Timer was unveiled at Watches & Wonders 2025, and yet it already feels like a Saxon staple. When it was announced, it was greeted with an incredible fanfare of praise. I must admit, I was a little slow to the party. Initially, I found three of the six limited edition colourways released for the event itself to be particularly impressive, but was unconvinced by the other three, and a bit underwhelmed by the two core models.
What a difference six months can make.
NOMOS Club Campus World Timer - Night Navigation
I’d been taken by the Volcano, Glacier, and Magma back in April. By now, the Dune has joined that list, and the Canyon is creeping towards it. I’m still on the fence about the Jungle model and the silver-faced core piece, but the big revelation is the midnight blue sunburst available in the standard collection. At the time of release, I thought it had not just missed the mark, but the dartboard entirely. Now, it seems, NOMOS had been aiming deep for a board hung on a distant wall in another room of the pub I didn’t even know existed. And, as it happens, it hit that bull’s eye. Perhaps less likely still, it changed my mind.
At first glance, the Club Sport neomatik World Timer can look like a tangled mess of colour, elements, and functions. But trust me, it’s worth giving it a second, third, fourth look — however many it takes for the logic of the layout to make sense to your brain. The way the 2 and the 4 numerals overlap the home time dial drove me mad the first time I saw them. Months after the fact, I realise I was mad for not seeing the ambitious harmony of it all. I don’t know, after all these years, I should know better. Never doubt NOMOS. Perhaps that’ll be my first tattoo…
I’m typing this as I’m shovelling a series of truly excellent small plates into my mouth, desperately trying to fuel up before the afternoon session of the sixth NOMOS Forum begins. I’m in the church that NOMOS acquired the best part of a decade ago now. Above my head hang the iconic “cloud’ lights that create an aesthetic bridge between the folksy backwater setting of Glashütte and the slick Kreuzberg-area hipness of Berliner Blau, the brand’s design studio located two hours away in the nation’s capital. For the first time in six years, I’ve been lumped in with the German contingent on account of my having lived in Dresden for long enough to be regarded as a “local”. Unsurprisingly, it makes little difference. The watch industry is small enough for me to know most of the faces I see beaming up towards the stage, and the format of the event is comfortingly formulaic enough for me to follow along with no issue.
To begin, we were treated to a refreshingly technical presentation by Mirko Heyne, the man whose name adorns the watch dials of the brand he founded with Marco Lang many years ago, and whose influence riddles the DUW series of calibres of which NOMOS is so justifiably proud. Following that, Katrin Bosse-Foy introduced an update to a classic model family that we can’t speak about until November (although check back here for the news when it breaks), Anabell Oeynhausen showed us the new Tetra colour set, due to debut in October, and finally, my good friend Robert Ahrendt presented the models we are allowed to talk about today — a new limited edition trio of NOMOS Glashütte Club Sport neomatik World Timers, dubbed the “Night Navigation” series.
As I mentioned at the top of the article, I’d already been through something of a spiritual conversion when it comes to the Club Sport World Timer, but had I still been undecided on the model’s viability, the Night Navigation capsule would’ve convinced me. It’s superb. Not only are the three colourways inspired by the cockpit of an aeroplane, which, let’s face it, is every aviation nut’s happy place, but they also represent the most legible interpretation of the dial layout yet.
There’s an argument to be made that the starkly contrasting colours of the earlier models played an effective role in demarcating the different “zones” of the dial, but seeing this somewhat more subdued approach works infinitely better in my mind.
Unlike the original six limited editions launched in April, the colour usage on these models follows a consistent “paint by numbers” pattern. All three dials use black as a primary base and orange as an accent colour for the time zone indicator and the home time hand. This isn’t the same blazing orange (RAL 2005) that NOMOS used for the original neomatik “champagner” releases in 2015 and the standard Club Campus seconds hand (or for the two Panda Weltzeit models I worked on for Fratello), instead, it is a softer shade that complements rather than dominates proceedings, allowing the secondary colour of each design to shine.
The three models use either an orange/brown, blue/turquoise, or green/yellow colour palette. Each one is inspired by the glowing buttons, knobs, and levers of the cockpit as well as the nighttime vistas viewable through the cockpit’s windows when coming in to land. This kind of inspiration is not uncommon, but the application of the colours here is so sensitive it feels uncommonly connected to the source material. It is a runaway (or maybe that should be runway?) success.
The city ring of each model is a darker shade of each secondary colour, so the text stands out against it. The upper hemisphere of the home time sub-dial is a lighter shade than the background of the city ring, but still darker than the secondary colour. The Western Arabic numerals are luminous and in the secondary colour. This ties everything together superbly. Using white numerals here might have been tempting if the brand were overly concerned with achieving the best and most consistent glow-in-the-dark performance across the collection, but the designers clearly chose to lean fully into the concept. The result is fantastic. What we have here is another no-holds-barred, full-blooded approach to concept execution that few brands in the world can pull off as well as NOMOS.
The only drawback? Each colourway is limited to 175 pieces. That means you might have to fire up your jets if you want one. And while this is a good thing for your wallet, the price point of these beauties will no doubt make competition all the fiercer, as these versatile watches are priced at just €3,940 each.
And when I say versatile, I mean it — at just 10 mm thick with a water resistance of 100 meters and the option of a metal bracelet, fabric strap, or leather band, these watches are designed to go anywhere and do anything with their wearers. Powered by the DUW 3202, another stellar in-house movement from the darling of German watchmaking, owners can be sure they are buying a top-quality horological machine from a vertical manufacture built to exist for generations into the future.
Final Thoughts
As a lover of fine watchmaking, I’m sure details matter as much to you as they do to me. They clearly matter to NOMOS. Frivolous and non-functional as it may be, the small globe motif that is not just engraved but rather CNC-machined into the rotor is a wordless reminder that you are buying a well-considered product from a brand that will leave no stone unturned in pursuit of perfection.
And with this release, it’s possible NOMOS has achieved just that.
