Forum Wetzlar

Forum Wetzlar opened in 2005 in Wetzlar, Hesse, with approximately 25,000 sqm of gross leasable area as the principal modern enclosed retail destination for the historic optical and precision technology city in central Hesse. The centre is managed by ECE Projektmanagement and serves Wetzlar’s approximately 53,000 residents and the surrounding Lahn-Dill region.

Wetzlar is historically significant as a seat of the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) and as a city associated with Goethe, who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther after his period as a legal trainee in Wetzlar in 1772. More commercially, Wetzlar is the headquarters of Leica Camera, the precision optical instruments manufacturer whose cameras defined documentary photography of the twentieth century, and is home to a cluster of precision optics, metrology, and medical technology companies that give the city’s approximately 53,000 residents an above-average income profile for a Hessian mid-sized city. Forum Wetzlar provides H&M and mainstream fashion and service retail for the Lahn-Dill subregional catchment. The A45 motorway provides access to Dortmund and Frankfurt.

Wetzlar’s population of approximately 53,000 provides the immediate base. The Lahn-Dill district catchment from Herborn, Dillenburg, and Braunfels extends the regional draw to approximately 200,000. The A45 Sauerlandlinie provides north-south motorway access. ICE connectivity from Giessen (15 kilometres north) provides rail access to Frankfurt in approximately 40 minutes.

ECE manages Forum Wetzlar as the commercial anchor for a precision technology city whose Leica heritage and metrology industry create an income profile above the Central Hessian average, a commercial environment in which the optical precision industry’s skilled workforce generates retail spending capacity that the modest population count understates.