It?s hard to relaunch a brand. We?ve seen it over and over in the watch industry: brands, in an attempt to reinvigorate themselves, gain more traction in the market, and adapt to changing times, will sometimes make a decision to completely rethink their philosophy, aesthetic, and core models. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn?t, and there are varying levels of intensity in how fully relaunched a brand will actually go. Sometimes the shift is drastic, with new logos, new ideas, new price points, and completely new watches. And sometimes it?s more subtle, representing a small but noticeable and important tweak that fundamentally changes something about the presentation. HYT, a high end Swiss brand that has been through its fair share of tumult recently, debuted a new collection recently that we got a chance to look at during Watches & Wonders week, and it struck me as one of the smartest recalibrations we?ve seen from a brand in a long time. 
If you know HYT at all, you know them for their unique time telling system that involves moving liquid around the dial through a pair of bellows that expand and contract throughout the day. There is quite literally nothing else like it on the market, and the watches have always had a half futuristic, half steam-punk vibe to them. There is real horological ingenuity at the heart of HYT, but the watches, in the past, have often been dominated by literally showing you the mechanism in a way that was, to put it bluntly, a...