Hautlence Luxury Wristwatches

A Common Passion – Hautlence

Renaud de Retz and Guillaume Tetu were simply two young men employed in the Swiss watch industry until about four years ago when they discovered they had a common passion. Experienced enough to understand where to find the know how they had jointly envisioned to create their awn unique brand of haute horlogerie they began work on their premier watch, resulting in something truly new in an industry where the wheel rarely gets reinvented. De Retz, who is in charge of marketing and communications, maintains that the company has a far-sighted and avant- garde approach to its timepieces. The original model, simply called HL, is currently available in seven different versions. Additionally, the consumer can also choose from nine sporty evolutions, His, which feature cases crafted in titanium and precious metals and come on rubber straps. Elucidating this view, de Retz explains, 7he fact that we are not watchmakers allows us to have a completely new approach. With Hautlence, we started from scratch and said to ourselves, ‘Let’s do what we want to see in a watch and what kind of watch we would like to egotistically have.’ This product, from our point of view, is ‘avant-garde’ because this is a new way of telling time and of showing beautiful mechanics.

Product Development Key at Hautlence

The original HL movement was a brand-new construction featuring an element that has not yet been used in watchmaking and which Tetu, who is in charge of product development, calls the connecting rod. Literally speaking, the hand- wound movement is regulator-style, but the hour disk, located on the left, is propelled by the connecting rod (visible horizontally along the bottom of the dial) between the hour disk and the retrograde minutes. When the minute hand reaches the end of its arc, its movement sets the connecting rod into motion and propels the disk forward one space.

A New Shape for Hautlence – HLq

This concept has now been thoroughly reworked to fit into a more classic round movement shape. While this might sound like a simple evolution, it is anything but: a 43.8 mm round case necessitated a total redesign of the movement to accommodate the new shape, now known as HLq. HLq is available in five versions combining titanium, rose gold, and white gold and is a stunning addition to the Hautlence line.

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