No longer overlooked: Betty Fiechter, pioneer in the world of watches

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.

In September, Swatch released a group of watches in collaboration with the venerable brand Blancpain: the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms collection, which, the company said, “met all the needs of underwater exploration.”

The original Fifty Fathoms – introduced by Blancpain in 1953 and still an anchor of the brand – was groundbreaking: it was considered the first modern diving watch, with a water resistance of up to around 90 meters. And it wouldn’t have happened without a woman who was just as groundbreaking: Betty Fiechter, the first female owner of a Swiss watch house in a traditionally male industry.

Fiechter (pronounced FEESH-tehr), who started as an apprentice, rose to the top with Blancpain in 1933. “It was completely unprecedented,” said Pascal Ravessoud, vice president of Swiss trade body Fondation de la Haute Horlogere. . “It would have been twice as difficult for a woman to fight her way through.”

During her 30-year tenure at Blancpain, which was acquired by Swatch in 1992, Fiechter held several positions, including president and general manager (titles she held simultaneously), and oversaw the creation of some of the company’s most successful watches. Company.

She emphasized women’s timepieces, such as the sleek and elegant Rolls, the first automatic watch designed for women, made in 1930, and the Ladybird, a delicate watch from 1956 that was considered at the time to have the smallest round movement or the smallest internal mechanism. . (Marilyn Monroe was famously a fan of Blancpain’s feminine creations.)

Fiechter led the company with a dominant presence and guided it through difficult times, including the Great Depression and World War II, with innovative sales methods.

Berthe Marie Fiechter was born on April 29, 1896 in Villeret, Switzerland, a center of Swiss watchmaking since the 17th century. Her father, Jacob Fiechter, owned a watchmaking company. (It was sold to Blancpain in 1914.) Her mother, Mary Lisa (Ramseyer) Fiechter, raised Betty and her five siblings.

Betty attended the vocational school near Villeret and was accepted as an apprentice by Blancpain in 1912, when she was 16. For seven generations, from 1735, Blancpain had been owned by the family that founded the company. Betty worked with the last surviving family member, Frédéric-Emile Blancpain.

The expectation at the time was that she would eventually take on a secretarial or administrative role at the company, but Frédéric-Emile Blancpain “saw more in her and also encouraged her to be more,” according to Jean-Marie Fiechter, the big star of Betty Fiechter. -cousin, said in an interview.

“She had no college education — no MBA or anything — but she was smart,” he added. “She knew how the watch business should work.”

Blancpain implicitly relied on Fiechter, who often worked without him at her side; she would run the brand’s watch production while he was at his home in Lausanne, about 90 kilometers southwest of Villeret, the Swiss city where Blancpain was based at the time. To keep him informed, she sent him weekly reports on wax cylinders played on phonographs—essentially the equivalent of leaving voicemail messages—and he sent back his own recorded responses.

When Blancpain died in 1932, his only daughter chose not to join the business, so Fiechter and her friend, André Léal, who also worked at the company, took over, with Fiechter becoming the CEO and Léal the sales director.

(For a time, due to Swiss regulations regarding brand ownership, they released new watches under the brand name Rayville-Blancpain until 1960.)

Fiechter’s tenure included challenging periods such as World War II, but she came up with inventive ways to ensure the company survived. For example, during the Depression, when the Buy American Act of 1933 required federal agencies to purchase domestic goods, they exported nearly completed watches to the United States, where the cases and final components would be added. At one point, she also prioritized selling timepieces to other watch brands in the United States.

But Fiechter’s focus remained on the brand: its survival and success.

She put everything she had into Blancpain, says Jeffrey Kingston, editor-in-chief of Lettres du Brassus, a magazine that publishes the watch brand, for which he wrote a profile of Fiechter in 2021.

“Basically, Blancpain became her family,” he said. “It was her whole life. She never married, she had no children, so her entire existence revolved around Blancpain.

In 1961, Blancpain joined an alliance of watch brands, the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogére, and Fiechter became a member of its board of directors. The partnership allowed her company to create a large number of timepieces for other affiliated brands, such as Omega and Tissot.

At about 6 feet tall, Fiechter towered over many of her male colleagues and expected them to be as tireless as she was. For example, during one of her daily visits to the brand’s watch workshop, she saw an employee taking a cigarette break and quickly collecting the employee’s wages.

That wasn’t her only eccentricity. Sometimes she shopped on Lausanne’s chic Rue du Bourg in her mink coat, accessorized with fluffy pink slippers. One afternoon she walked into a beauty salon in Villeret and demanded – and received – service, even though the hairdresser was with another customer; She then left mid-session to attend to an urgent matter at the office, with the curlers still on her head.

“She didn’t care at all,” her second cousin said. “If it was good for her, then it was good for her, period.”

When Léal died suddenly in 1939, Fiechter became the sole owner of Blancpain. Around 1950 she was diagnosed with cancer and had a nephew, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, to help her run the business. (His love of diving contributed to the development of Fifty Fathoms.)

Fiechter’s disease remained in remission for almost twenty years, but a final attack led to her death, on September 14, 1971. She was 75.