HYT is one of the more unusual names in independent watchmaking, a brand built entirely around a single, genuinely new complication: a moving column of liquid instead of hands. Despite that, the man it all started with, its co-founder and the inventor of its technology, Lucien Vouillamoz, is barely known even to serious collectors. He’s spent most of the brand’s life letting a rotating cast of hired chief executives do the talking while he worked on the fluidics in the background. This year, that’s finally changed, which is why, when the chance came up to sit down with him directly, we took it.
Vouillamoz took an idea that had no engineering precedent, no supplier who could help, and no obvious reason to succeed, and forced it into a functioning watch anyway. The idea itself goes back further than watchmaking itself, to the clepsydra, the water clock used some 3,500 years ago. The immediate starting point, though, was a conversation with friends around Expo.02, the Swiss national exhibition staged across three lakes, and a fairly blunt observation: a mobile phone already gives you free, satellite-corrected time, so a high-end watch was never really selling precision in the first place. “If you buy an independent watch, you’re crazy, basically,” Vouillamoz says. “You spend an insane amount of money for basically a piece of art, a technological performance for your feelings.” If the watch didn’t need to be useful, he reasoned, it could borrow from something older and stranger than mechanical watchmaking altogether, complete with the marketing joke that comes with it. “We can claim to have existed since around 1500 BC,” he says, needling brands that trade on centuries-old founding dates. “You are a bit young. We have 3,500 years more experience than you.”
It took an ultimatum from his eldest daughter, in 2008, to actually turn the idea into a company. “Naomi said, ‘Lucien, do it or shut up,’” he says. “That pushed me to do it.” What he settled on was a thin glass capillary carrying liquid whose position marks the time, developed through Preciflex, a company he co-founded. To fund it, he called an old business partner, Patrick Berdoz, now chairman of both HYT and Preciflex, with a pitch that was less business plan than dare. “I don’t have the money you have, but I have my brain,” he told him. “We’ll go half and half. You bring the money, I bring the idea. After a year or two, we’re dead. You’ve lost your money, I’ve lost my idea, and we drink a beer together. Are you okay with that?” Berdoz agreed, on what Vouillamoz remembers as 10 lines on a sheet of paper.
Vouillamoz himself, though, wasn’t the one telling this story for most of HYT’s life. When the company needed a public face, he ruled himself out. “The first natural face would be me, but I have other companies,” he says. “You can’t have two faces of a brand. You need one.” So HYT hired outside chief executives instead, starting with Vincent, while Vouillamoz stayed behind the scenes as what he calls “the crazy inventor of the technology”.
That arrangement began to shift when the company was recapitalised, a moment at which Vouillamoz reinvested in it, and changed fully only a few months ago, when he returned to day-to-day operations within a simplified organisation. “We decided, finally, to put the inventor forward as the face of the brand,” he says. It fits how he describes the brand more generally: “I love to be honest, I’m a transparent guy. The HYT story is not a long, quiet river.” Asked if he’s enjoying being that face, he doesn’t hesitate: “Surprisingly, yes. I’m passionate about it.”
The passion, he’s quick to add, isn’t only his. “It’s craftsmanship,” he says of the workshop behind the fluidic module. “There’s a lot of feeling from the workers who put their art into it by hand… and when that theatre has to move liquid, it’s a level higher again. I’ve seen that HYT provokes passion. People love that, and I have to say, me too.”
The hardest technical barrier, between the original idea and the first working H1, wasn’t the one he expected. “It’s the unexpected one,” he says. “What was extremely surprising for me is the way liquids behave in a tube.” HYT’s module runs a coloured liquid and a transparent one through a capillary, and the coloured liquid kept clinging to the glass on its return stroke instead of releasing cleanly. “Do you know Tupperware? Have you ever washed it after it’s had salad inside? The oil sticks,” he says.
The fix was a bespoke surface coating, developed with a Stanford-connected scientist in San Diego, expensive to produce at first, and brought down significantly in cost once the process moved in-house at Preciflex in Switzerland. “That’s the only component that isn’t visible,” he says. “Without it, the watch doesn’t run.” Across the project, moulding glass to watchmaking tolerances and building machinery to fill a sealed tube with two liquids and no trapped air, he reckons HYT and Preciflex had to develop several hundred new processes from nothing.
Vouillamoz has spent most of his time around the industry without being especially visible in it, which perhaps explains how bluntly he talks about how it’s changed. “If you talk to tech billionaires, you might see a guy wearing a T-shirt, and you’d never think he’s a billionaire,” he says. “But if you’re talking to the CEO of an independent brand, you’d probably think he is.”
He argues the sector has spent years shaped by private-banking money treating watches as “alternative assets” alongside contemporary art and classic cars, with auction houses setting headline prices and the grey market telling the real one. “My impression is that there’s currently a move towards more authenticity,” he says. “Buyers are really looking not only at the watches but also the history behind them.” Old friends elsewhere in the scene, he adds, are “suffering a bit at the moment”.
Asked what would make him say HYT has actually succeeded (not an award, not a sales number, but the thing that means the idea worked the way he first pictured it) he says: “First, I think we didn’t succeed.” His real benchmark was for the whole industry to open a category around liquid-based complications, and that hasn’t happened. What he’ll claim instead is narrower and more personal. “I’m absolutely proud of the current models. To me, they’re crazy. We managed to make an extremely comfortable, wearable watch with this technology… you don’t feel that it’s 45mm,” he says. He’s equally proud of the collaborations behind it: with watchmaker Eric Coudray, who designed the multiple-cam system at the heart of the T1 and S1, as well as the brand’s conical tourbillon, and with Renaud & Papi on the H2. “It’s a mix. I’m happy, but there’s still a lot to do ahead of us.”
What’s next, on his account, is part roadmap and part manifesto: delivering the current collection on schedule, expanding the bespoke tourbillon programme, and further out, complications built around other pre-mechanical ways of marking time (the hourglass, the sundial) under a project he sums up as “time, casting, matter and light”, on roughly a 10-year horizon. None of it, he’s clear, counts for much without the basics. “Trust in the brand, because the story was, I’d say, a bit chaotic,” he says, “and reliability, a good personal connection, and respect for all our collectors.”
Not everyone on the call let him get away with the harder line he’d taken on his own success, though. Caroline, an HYT colleague sitting in on the interview, pushed back directly: “Taking into account all the challenges HYT had to face when launching this new complication, which is a real complication, I think the only fact that you have a watch that is precise and that is functional, it is a success.” Vouillamoz didn’t argue.
