The Nomos Club Campus is something of a quirky one. The original Nomos Club can cite a relatively classic and simple dial as part of its strong visual appeal, yet the Campus simply doesn’t follow suit. A watch that looks perfect on more robust wrists. The classic from NOMOS Glashütte, and number one: the handcrafted and manually wound Alpha caliber, which keeps on running—highly precise and highly praised, you only need to wind it once every two days.
Any conversation about watches that offer good value for money is bound to include NOMOS. It’s been a core tenet of the brand since the very beginning and every year we get some new release that shocks us with its price tag to gears-and-hands ratio. With the new Club Campus though, NOMOS is trying to push it even further, offering a fun watch specifically targeted at first-time watch owners receiving their timepieces for special occasions. Oh, and they’re awesome.
Earlier this week we showed you the new Club Neomatik, which can be considered the sort of “premium” Club model with intricate dials, open casebacks, and NOMOS’s latest slim automatic movements inside. The Club Campus offers a lot of the same details and look, only at half the price.
There three Club Campus models, in two sizes. The first watch is a 36mm Club, with the familiar long-lugged case, and the other two are 38mm Clubs, all in stainless steel. This means you can now get the Club in 36mm, 37mm, 38mm, 40mm, and 41.5mm, so there’s really a size for everyone. The Nomos Club Campus are all three-handers, luminous hour and minute hands and a sub-seconds register down at six o’clock. The dials are California dials, meaning there are Arabic numerals up top and Roman numerals down below. This is something we’ve never seen from NOMOS before and I really dig it.
One of the ways NOMOS has kept the price down on these watches is that inside is the Alpha caliber. This is still an in-house NOMOS movement, but it’s the oldest movement in the collection and doesn’t feature the Swing System escapement or the Neomatik winding system. It’s a manually-wound movement with 17 jewels and a 43-hour power reserve. Don’t misunderstand me here – this is a great movement. It might not be the fanciest, but that’s not what this watch is about.
Smartly, NOMOS has opted for a closed caseback here. It’s another cost-savings method, but more importantly it takes the focus away from the movement and places it on the experience of wearing the watch (not to mention making it slimmer too). For this watch though there’s another benefit: the expanse of steel offers a space for custom engravings, whether it be for a gift or a self-purchase. NOMOS is offering complementary engraving on all Nomos Club Campus watches and turn-around time is just a week or two.
The three models offer different colors, but all in the same general family. The 36mm has slightly more emphasis on the red and pink tones, while the similar 38mm model more prominently displays the bright blue SuperLuminova. The Nacht model, with the dark dial, is the most distinctive, and offers something for those who don’t want a light silvered dial. Personally, I like all three models pretty equally and think it really comes down to personal style here.