This article is part of it It is overlookeda series of obituaries for notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in the Times.
In September, Swatch launched a group of watches in collaboration with the venerable Blancpain brand: the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms collection, which the company said “covers 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 diver’s watch, water-resistant to about 300 feet. And it wouldn’t have been created without a woman who was just as pioneering: Betty Fiechter, the first female owner of a Swiss watch house in a traditionally male industry.
Fiechter (pronounced FEESH-tehr), who had started as an apprentice, rose to the top at Blancpain in 1933. “It was completely unprecedented,” said Pascal Ravessoud, vice president of the Swiss trade body Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. . “It would be twice as hard for a woman to get her way.”
In her 30-year tenure at Blancpain, which was acquired by Swatch in 1992, Fiechter held various positions, including president and general manager (titles she held simultaneously), and oversaw the creation of some of the company’s most successful watches.
He emphasized women’s watches, such as the slim and elegant Rolls, the first automatic watch designed for women, created in 1930, and the Ladybird, a delicate piece from 1956 that was then considered to have the smallest round watch movement or internal mechanism. . (Marilyn Monroe was famously a fan of Blancpain’s feminine creations.)
Fiechter managed the company with a commanding presence and led it through difficult times, such as 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 1600s. Her father, Jacob Fiechter, owned a company that made watch movements. (Sold to Blancpain in 1914.) Her mother, Mary Lisa (Ramseyer) Fiechter, raised Betty and her five siblings.
Betty attended a vocational school near Villeret and was hired by Blancpain as an apprentice in 1912 when she was 16 years old. For seven generations, starting in 1735, Blancpain belonged to the family that founded it. Betty worked alongside the last member of her family, Frédéric-Emile Blancpain.
The expectation at the time would have been that she would eventually take on a secretarial or administrative role with the company, but Frédéric-Emile Blancpain “saw more in her and also pushed her to become more,” Jean-Marie Fiechter, Betty Fiechter’s great. -nephew, he said in an interview.
“She didn’t have a university education – no MBA, or anything – but she was smart,” he added. “He knew how the watch company should be run.”
Blancpain implicitly trusted Fiechter, who often worked without him at her side. will run the brand’s watchmaking business while he is at home in Lausanne, about 60 miles southwest of Villeret, the Swiss town where Blancpain was based at the time. To keep him informed, she sent him weekly reports of wax cylinders played on phonographs—essentially the equivalent of voicemail—and he sent his own recorded replies.
When Blancpain died in 1932, his only daughter chose not to be involved in the business. So Fiechter and her friend André Léal, who also worked at the company, took over, with Fiechter becoming CEO and Léal as sales manager.
(Due to Swiss regulations regarding brand ownership, many of their new watches were released under the Rayville-Blancpain brand until 1960.)
Fiechter’s tenure included periods of challenges, such as World War II, but she found inventive ways for the company to survive. During the Depression, for example, when the Buy American Act of 1933 required federal agencies to buy domestic goods, he exported nearly finished watches to the United States, where the cases and final fittings would be added. At one point, it also prioritized selling watch movements to other watch brands in the United States.
But Fiechter’s focus remained on the brand—its survival and success.
He put everything he had into Blancpain, said Jeffrey Kingston, one of two editors-in-chief of Lettres du Brassus, a magazine published by 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, never had children, so her whole existence revolved around Blancpain.”
In 1961, Blancpain joined an alliance of watch brands, the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère, and Fiechter became a member of its board of directors. The partnership has enabled its company to make a huge number of watch movements for other member brands, such as Omega and Tissot.
At about six feet tall, Fiechter towered over many of her male colleagues and expected them to be as tireless as she was. On one of her daily visits to the brand’s watchmaking atelier, for example, she spotted an employee taking a cigarette break and quickly docked the worker’s salary.
This was not her only eccentricity. She sometimes shopped in Lausanne’s posh Rue du Bourg in her mink coat, accessorised with fluffy pink bedroom slippers. One afternoon in Villeret, she walked into a beauty salon and asked for—and got—service, even though the salon was with another customer. She then left mid-session to attend to a pressing matter at the office, curls still on her head.
“She didn’t care at all,” her nephew said. “If it was right for her, it was right for her, period.”
When Léal died suddenly in 1939, Fiechter became the sole owner of Blancpain. Around 1950, she was diagnosed with cancer and gave birth to a nephew, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, to help her run the company. (His love of diving helped inspire the development of Fifty Fathoms.)
Fiechter’s illness went into remission for almost two decades, but a terminal episode led to her death on September 14, 1971. She was 75 years old.