Hautlence was founded in 2004 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, by Guillaume Tetu and Renaud de Retz. The brand name is an anagram of Neuchâtel, the Swiss city where the firm is based. The founding proposition was unusual: an avant-garde haute-horlogerie brand producing jumping-hour wristwatches with non-traditional display architectures, positioned alongside Urwerk and MB&F in the "alternative complications" segment.
The house's defining technical signature is the rotating-chain jumping-hour display. Where a conventional jumping-hour disc rotates continuously under an aperture, the Hautlence mechanism uses a small belt or chain of twelve numeric discs that cycles the hour digit past a dial window, with each digit discrete rather than painted on a rotating disc. This creates the appearance of the hours physically marching past the aperture rather than smoothly rotating. The HL series (2005-2014) and the HLX series (2015-2020) deployed this architecture across multiple case shapes.
The second signature is the Vortex tonneau case, an angular, asymmetric tonneau introduced in 2017. The Vortex places the time display off-centre at 9 o'clock with an elaborate mechanical architecture exposed on the rest of the dial. The design references both 1970s-era architectural tonneau cases (Piaget Polo, Franck Muller) and more recent avant-garde independent case work.
In 2012, Hautlence was acquired by MELB Holding, the Swiss investment group that also owns H. Moser & Cie. MELB positions Hautlence as a sister brand to H. Moser: where Moser occupies restrained dress-watch haute horlogerie, Hautlence covers avant-garde technical complications. Both brands share some technical resources at MELB's Neuhausen am Rheinfall manufacture. Retail for Hautlence runs from approximately CHF 25,000 (Atelier HL series) to CHF 120,000+ (Vortex Tourbillon) and CHF 250,000+ for unique and grand-complication pieces.
