363.150, Odysseus, Honeygold

In 2025, A. Lange & Söhne announced a very limited run of the Odysseus—100 examples in their proprietary Honeygold. This small edition debuted what is a new aesthetic for A. Lange & Söhne: not just their most special case metal, but a tobacco-tone brown dial. It was the first precious metal bracelet the brand made since the early Wellendorff bracelets, a resurgence of a craft sorely missed. In Schmid's own words: 'With the Odysseus, we laid the foundation for our latest watch family in 2019, thus unfolding a creative potential for us that we further tapped into by developing this new model in Honeygold. In a special way, the warm lustre emanating from this exceptional colour combination reflects our ambition to never stand still.'

The Honeygold alloy itself would normally the star of the show, and its backstory is worth unpacking. Honeygold is a patented gold, copper, and zinc alloy developed in 2010, introduced on three anniversary watches commemorating 165 years of the manufacture—the Tourbograph "Pour le Mérite," the Lange 1 Tourbillon, and the 1815 Moon Phase. The material was engineered specifically to overcome a fundamental problem with yellow gold: its tendency to scratch almost immediately, an obvious liability for a sports watch case. The Odysseus Honeygold takes the alloy somewhere it has never gone before— bracelet. The hardness that makes Honeygold ideal for watch cases creates a genuine headache for machining small components like bracelet links, let alone the finely worked integral three-pin links Lange employs. The secret blend of metals has a habit of prematurely destroying tooling, a genuinely limiting factor of production. The result is a pale alloy with 18k gold content and a hardness level surpassing platinum. 

The story behind the Odysseus is are as compelling as the watch itself. The project's intellectual origin traces to the late Günter Blümlein, the visionary executive who co-orchestrated Lange's rebirth in 1990 alongside Walter Lange. Among Blümlein's archived notes, written in the early days of the relaunched brand, was a single phrase: ‘time steel’—shorthand for his ambition to one day create a sporty, elegant Lange in steel. It fell to Anthony de Haas, who joined as Director of Product Development in 2004, to eventually carry that vision to completion. De Haas has noted that the Odysseus project went through three attempts over roughly 15 years before it reached production. It case, in full Lange proportions, retains the signature cues of Lange such as the three-body finishing techinques and strong lug design. The bracelet, with its unique decoupling system, went through almost 50 protoypes before landing on this version, with an abundance of difficult-to-finish-bevels against satin brushed exposed surfaces. 

The numbers surrounding this release are extraordinary in their own right. The five-row solid Honeygold bracelet is a first in the brand's history—and despite a production run of just 100 individually numbered pieces, Schmid has admitted the brand could have sold 500 at launch and still faced a queue, noting that producing the Honeygold required reallocating movements that had been budgeted for other references. The movement inside, calibre L155.1, is assembled twice per Lange's longstanding protocol and features German silver bridges and plates, gold-inlaid engraved lettering, hand-polished anglage, and a skeletonized 950 platinum-edge rotor. 

This Honeygold Odysseus is simultaneously the most opulent and most purposeful expression of a watch that took decades to exist. De Haas has stated his project walks the line between sporting and elegant, where the Honeygold underscores the more elegant side of the equation. It is the ultimate German integrated bracelet sports watch, and at a production of 100 examples will remain amongst the manufacture’s most special productions for all time. 

This example is modelled on an average-sized 7-inch wrist.