Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo is thrilled to welcome you to The Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2023, online auction, running from 12:00 PM CET, Friday, September 8, to 2:00 PM CET, Friday, September 15. Featuring more than 130 different high-end luxury wristwatches, the sale covers everything from A. Lange & Söhne and F.P. Journe to Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe. It even includes a circa 2011 Hautlence HLQ 08 Classic Limited Edition in titanium.
– Logan Baker
Hautlence is not a new brand. The Swiss watchmaker was founded in 2004, when the high-end independent watchmaking scene was in the middle of a boom cycle defined by the so-called “hyperwatch.”
Unfortunately, when the Global Financial Crisis occurred in the late 2000s, many of those new companies faltered and disappeared. Hautlence, however, was one of the few brands born in this era to survive, alongside similar avant-garde pioneers De Bethune (founded in 2002), MB&F (founded in 2004), and Greubel Forsey (2004).
Despite its continued existence, Hautlence is a much smaller brand today than any of those surviving peers. The company has persisted thanks to a wonderfully creative approach to mechanical watchmaking that is unlike anything else on the market. The same uniqueness that makes Hautlence so special, unfortunately, hasn’t always been a strength.
The company struggled to find an identity for much of the 2010s, leading its owners to pause all brand activities in 2020 and 2021.
Hautlence made its official return almost exactly one year ago during the Geneva Watch Days exhibition. And I'm glad to report that its future now looks brighter than ever before.
I met with Hautlence's brand manager, Samuel Hoffmann, last week to chat about the brand’s past, its recent evolution, and what Hautlence’s future might look like – a perfect coincidence, since the catalog for our now-live Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2023, Online Auction includes an example of the very-cool Hautlence HLQ08 Classic from the early 2010s.
How We Got Here
The name Hautlence, funnily enough, was originally chosen because it’s an anagram for the Swiss city of Neuchâtel, where the company was founded in 2004 by watch-industry veterans Renaud de Retz and Guillaume Tetu.
The pair had plenty of experience working in the traditional realm of watchmaking, as part of multinational conglomerate firms with Longines, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and TAG Heuer, but they wanted a fresh start. They wanted to create a line of watches using a new perspective and that prioritized the use of visible mechanics. Their first few watches, introduced under the HL- naming convention, did exactly that, utilizing a unique TV-shaped case design that soon became a brand signature, as well as highly mechanical individual timekeeping displays, such as jumping hours and retrograde minutes.
Although the first watches utilized ébauche calibers from Peseux with modular additions for the unique displays, Hautlence was determined to grow and move upmarket, so in 2005 they started introducing in-house, proprietary movements of increasing complexity.
Tetu eventually became the sole face of Hautlence in 2009, when de Retz departed the company, all the way up until 2013, when Hautlence was sold to MELB Holding, a holding company established and run by the former CEO of Audemars Piguet, Georges-Henri Meylan.
Hautlence was MELB Holding's first major acquisition of a watch brand, followed three months later by the addition of H. Moser & Cie. to the business portfolio. MELB Holding also owns Precision Engineering, a manufacturing facility in Schaffhausen that has the capacity to produce hairsprings and is a well-known supplier for the Swiss watch industry at large.
Although Moser and Hautlence were both struggling financially in the early 2010s, it soon became clear that H. Moser & Cie. would be the focus for this growing conglomerate, when Georges-Henri Meylan’s son, Eduouard, was appointed CEO of H. Moser (a role he still has today). Tetu, meanwhile, was retained as Hautlence's leader until 2016.
Hautlence continued to release a diverse range of interesting and compelling – if, admittedly, rather esoteric – new watches until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. That’s when MELB Holding hit pause on all marketing and distribution for Hautlence, allowing the entire business an unexpected period to reflect on what the brand's future might be.
Finally, after two long years of dormancy, Hautlence officially returned in September 2022, with an updated product and brand strategy, as well as plans for a refined collection of watches.
“Edouard came to me a year and a half ago and said, ‘Listen, would you be interested in relaunching Hautlence?’” Hoffmann, Hautlence’s current brand manager, says. “That's where this whole process of relaunching the company – to get to the core of what Hautlence as a brand actually means – and bringing it to where it is now, began.”
Synergy, And The Three Tenets Of Hautlence
Hoffmann worked closely with Edouard Meylan and the rest of the MELB Holding board to establish three core rules that would define the brand identity of a Hautlence watch.
- “The first point is our TV-shaped case,” Hoffmann says. “The cases in our new watches, for instance the HL Linear Series 2 in stainless steel that we launched at Watches and Wonders this year, utilizes the TV-shaped design but it has a more modern complexion, with an integrated rubber strap and water resistance up to one hundred meters. All our complications will be water resistant now.”
- “Our second point is all about motion,” he says. “Hautlence is all about the concept of not reading the time but watching it pass through our TV case. We have a combined jumping and retrograde hour display on the left side of the HL Linear Series 2, which looks a bit like those big TV buttons from the ‘70s. It’s the same sort of spirit with the updated HL Sphere Series 1; we’ve relaunched it using a single piece of sapphire crystal for the case, allowing a view of the action of the mechanical displays.”
- “Our price point also has to be very interesting,” he continues. “We priced the original HL Sphere from 2019 at CHF 99,000; this new edition, however, is priced at CHF 66,000. That's partially due to the new movement we developed for it, which uses a modular system for the spherical jumping hours.”
The Hautlence team relies on the watchmakers at Precision Engineering, which it shares with H. Moser; in fact, the Hautlence team today is basically just four or five people (including Hoffman) that are focused on product and business development.
The strategy of sharing watchmakers across brands does mean that Hautlence has officially relocated from its original namesake and home in the Swiss Romandy to the German-speaking city of Schaffhausen. It’s a completely different environment, for sure, but it is producing results, and it allows Hautlence access to several impressive horological inventions that previously might have remained exclusive to Moser. The Linear Series 2, for instance, utilizes a Moser base movement, featuring Moser’s signature flying tourbillon with double hairsprings, while the module for the timekeeping displays is sourced from Agenhor, Jean-Marc Wiederrecht's high-concept movement workshop.
This intra-group synergy is new for Hautlence, and it’s having a welcome impact internally.
“Now that Moser, Precision Engineering, and Hautlence are all under one roof, it automatically builds synergies and a more understanding relationship of one another,” Hoffmann says. “We have synergies in finance, logistics, all those typical things, but also the watchmaking is done together to a certain extent – and we all profit from it.”
What’s Next
“I would say, in a nice sense, that we didn't always have the correct identity in the past,” Hoffmann says. “I think it was important for us to redefine what Hautlence really means; it might've become a bit unclear at a certain stage, which made things kind of difficult. That was what we needed to work on.”
Hoffmann has steadied the Hautlence ship over the past year. Production in 2022 was limited to around 100 watches, and the team hopes to hit approximately 170 by the end of this year, and potentially 250 watches in 2024. He’s also taken steps to minimize Hautlence’s retail presence around the world from 35 doors previously to now just 15, all located in critical markets such as Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan); the United States (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas); Europe (Switzerland, France, United Kingdom); and the Middle East (Dubai). They’re potentially looking at adding a small number of additional doors in the near future, including in Germany and Silicon Valley.
By keeping the retail and production numbers small, Hoffmann is able to better manage Hautlence's growth going forward. He plans for all future releases to remain limited production, but we can expect approximately four new launches from Hautlence per year, including two brand-new novelties that Hoffmann says will always incorporate either a new movement or a new timekeeping system – staying true to Hautlence’s creative spirit.
“I think it’s important to keep our rhythm moving, to keep the innovation going,” he says. “The idea is obviously to grow, but we don't ever want to do extreme numbers; we want to stay niche. We don't need to “commercialize” in the big sense of the word, which is what allows us to keep our creativity.”
You can learn more, place a bid, and view the entire Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2023, catalog here.
About Phillips In Association With Bacs & Russo
The team of specialists at PHILLIPS Watches is dedicated to an uncompromised approach to quality, transparency, and client service. Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo holds the world record for the most successful watch auction, with its Geneva Watch Auction: XIV having realized $74.5 million in 2021. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, the company sold 100% of the watches offered, a first in the industry, resulting in the highest annual total in history across all the auction houses at $227 million.
About Logan Baker
Logan has spent the past decade reporting on every aspect of the watch business. He joined Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo at the start of 2023 as the department's Senior Editorial Manager. He splits his time between New York and Geneva.
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