In the world of German watches, there aren’t that many players, unlike the Swiss. High-brow brands such as A. Lange & Söhne, Glashütte Original, Montblanc, and Moritz Grossman occupy the higher price tiers, but when you start lowering the price point below a few grand, the remaining standout brands such as Sinn, Hanhart, Tutima, Nomos, Laco, and Damasko dominate the space. None of these brands comes close to the volume of watches produced by their Swiss counterparts, but they are all impeccably crafted and beloved in watch circles.
Enter German microbrand Dievas. Introduced in 2006 by Gnomon Watches, a watch dealer out of Singapore, Dievas is still very much niche even for the German watch cognoscenti. The good news is that every Dievas watch is built in Deutschland and made to take a beating.
Until recently, the German members of my watch collection included the Hanhart 417 ES pilot’s chronograph, the Damasko DA36, and the Sinn U50 Professional. Like Tutima, Damasko, and Sinn, Dievas’s primary focus is on tool watches, which are purpose-built and made to be worn hard. I had heard a lot about Dievas in watch forums, and I finally took the plunge when the Maya MK III Sealab Blue showed up in an email from Gnomon. For $1,240 minus a whopping 20 percent off for special Gnomon Lounge members, I ordered the Maya MK III Sealab Blue, one of six different colorways of the third-generation Maya.
