hen this author first set eyes on the Blancpain Lady B, it was love at first sight. A red gold bubble on a coloured double-tour calfskin strap that has the good taste to give the time. For anyone who cares about watches, knowing that this delightful jewel, designed to be enjoyed both day and night, is equipped with an automatic mechanical movement only adds to its charm.
When celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first timepiece in the Ladybird collection, the Ladybird Bullet, rather than reissue the archive model, Blancpain has chosen to reinvent it for today. “We wanted to go back to the origins, to keep writing the story rather than content ourselves with a reissue. We named the new model Blancpain Lady B and in a way the “B” captures the project’s entire history: Lady B for Ladybird, for Lady Blancpain and for Lady Betty Fiechter,” explains Christian Lattmann, Vice President, Head of Product Management at Blancpain.
Indeed, Betty Fiechter is where we should begin, before turning to the watch itself. After all, it’s thanks to this colourful though little-known character that Blancpain survived in the 1930s, following the death of Frédéric-Émile Blancpain, a descendant of founder Jehan-Jacques Blancpain.
Betty Fiechter, a woman in a man’s world
At a time when women were denied a voice in the business world, and Swiss women didn’t yet have the right to vote, Betty Fiechter climbed the ranks at Blancpain to the very top, running the company from 1933 until 1968. Born in Villeret in 1896, she was 16 when she arrived at Blancpain as a trainee secretary and quickly became one of Frédéric-Émile Blancpain’s closest collaborators.
Betty was still in her early twenties when Frédéric-Émile put her in charge of the brand’s industrial and commercial management, gradually entrusting her with the day-to-day running of the business when he moved from Villeret to Lausanne. Her great-nephew, Jean-Marie Fiechter, describes him as “a mentor for Betty Fiechter. He taught her so much. Most of all, he had confidence in her abilities.”
When Frédéric-Émile passed away in 1932, leaving Blancpain facing an uncertain future, Betty Fiechter decided she would take over the company, alongside sales director André Léal. This was 1933. Betty borrowed heavily in order to finance the purchase. This was an enormous risk in the depths of the Great Depression. Because the Blancpain family were no longer part of the business, under Swiss law she was obliged to change the company name. Blancpain became Rayville S.A. Successeur de Blancpain — Rayville being Villeret in reverse (the name also has a nice ring to it in English).
Betty Fiechter thus became the first woman co-owner of a Swiss watch brand: no small achievement in this male-dominated industry. After André Léal died in 1939, leaving Betty alone at the helm, she single-handedly steered the company through the 1930s economic crisis, the Second World War, and the transformations that shook the post-war watch industry.
While Betty Fiechter’s life has been documented on paper, we asked Jean-Marie Fiechter, her great-nephew, to share his recollections of this remarkable woman. His memories are those of a child (he was nine when she passed away) yet he paints an astonishingly detailed picture, beginning with a silhouette : “She was almost six feet tall. For the boy I was, she cut an imposing figure.” Despite her impressive stature, Betty showed great kindness towards her many great-nephews. “We lived in the same village and I’d often visit her at home, which was also her office. Sometimes she’d sit on the carpet with me and we’d play a game or look at a book together.”
For the young Jean-Marie, Betty Fiechter was an affectionate great-aunt. Her more than 200 employees at Blancpain saw a different side to her character. “Running a company during the Second World War wasn’t easy. Most of the men had been called up for active service. I imagine she had to fight some hard battles.”
Jean-Marie Fiechter continues: “She always believed she had a legacy to respect. Blancpain’s legacy. She felt she had a responsibility towards the manufacture.” Sometimes, this sense of responsibility took the form of “maternal” gestures. “She had power and used it. At the same time, at Christmas she was always generous towards Rayville-Blancpain’s employees as well as the people in the village. She felt a sense of responsibility not just with respect to the factory and its staff, but the village itself.”
This generous nature is borne out by another of Jean-Marie’s recollections: “Aunt Betty inherited some land and, because she didn’t want to speculate, she divided it into plots which she sold to former employees for less than market value. She wanted them to be able to live there in reasonably priced homes.”
An atypical character, period photographs show that Betty was also a supremely elegant lady, as her great-nephew recalls: “She always wore her signature strands of pearls. I remember she owned some large brooches set with precious stones and wore a signet ring. She had several relatively plain watches on a leather strap, either Omega or Blancpain, as well as some jewellery watches, which she loved.”
However elegant, Betty Fiechter wasn’t one to let convention dictate her appearance. Jean-Marie Fiechter tells how “Aunt Betty had large feet that were often painful, and had trouble finding shoes in her size. Rather than wear an uncomfortable pair, she would go out to dinner or shopping on Rue Haldimand in Lausanne wearing a pretty dress, a mink coat and pink bath slippers with a swan’s-down trim!”
Asked why his great-aunt hasn’t been given the public recognition she deserves, Jean-Marie Fiechter answers, “she never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t in her nature.”
Betty Fiechter had her own ideas as to what a lady’s watch should be: certainly not a scaled-down version of a men’s model. To her mind, a woman’s watch had its own codes and should be almost as much an item of jewellery as a timepiece. “Betty considered a lady’s evening watch as a jewel that also gave the time,” confirms Jean-Marie Fiechter, adding that “this vision was supported by high-level research into movement miniaturisation.”
1956, the remarkable Ladybird
Size, or lack of, was one of the greatest challenges for women’s watches in the 1940s and 1950s. Blancpain worked on ever smaller mechanisms until the R52/R55, a 5¼-ligne (11.85mm) calibre. When the Ladybird launched in 1956, it was advertised as having the smallest round mechanical movement in the world.
This smaller diameter was only part of the exploit, as Blancpain succeeded in offering the same performance in a now tiny space. Despite its diminutive size, the R52/R55 supplied more than 40 hours of power reserve. This paradox becomes the through-line connecting the original Ladybird and the contemporary Blancpain Lady B: complexity disappears behind apparent simplicity.
The Ladybird made its debut in the Atomic Age and a world whose fascination with science and space was mirrored by an aesthetic language of aerodynamic forms and innovative volumes. Eero Saarinen designed the Tulip chair in 1956; in 1957 Cristóbal Balenciaga revolutionised women’s fashion with the Sack dress; in 1958 General Motors unveiled the Firebird III, a futuristic concept car with two bubble-shaped cockpits in plexiglass. That same year, the Atomium was built in Brussels. Composed of nine spheres measuring 18 metres across, it became an enduring symbol of mid-century design. The Blancpain Lady B doesn’t reproduce this visual language “word for word” but captures its spirit. It is both modern and retro-futuristic.
First, the movement
When creating the Blancpain Lady B, the watchmakers once again began with the movement. This new model is driven by calibre 615, one of Blancpain’s smallest automatic movements at 15.7mm in diameter and 3.9mm thick. “We wanted to return to the origins of the Ladybird and were fortunate that we had the 615 movement, one of the smallest on the market,” says Christian Lattmann. “This being Blancpain, there was never any question of using a quartz calibre. It had to be mechanical. The challenge then was to fit an automatic mechanical movement inside this miniature watch.”
This choice would have considerable implications for the watch’s design. With such a tiny surface — the Blancpain Lady B measures 19mm in diameter and has a volume of just 2.9 cubic centimetres — every fraction of a millimetre counts. As Christian Lattmann explains, “this model presented two main difficulties. The first was miniaturisation; to accommodate a tiny mechanical movement inside the smallest possible watch, built around that movement. The second challenge was the shape of the watch itself. We wanted this to be an organic shape, to obtain a form of absolute purity that would reveal nothing of its complex construction. But this simplicity is hard to achieve and production demands considerable expertise. The case has a two-part construction, like the 1956 original. However, on the new version the dividing line is lower and almost disappears. We wanted it to be like a bubble, an object that invites touch. Something extremely sensory and feminine, like a jewel.”
Despite being concealed inside the assembled watch, the movement is decorated to Blancpain’s customary high standards, with Côtes de Genève, circular graining and bevelling. The oscillating weight is in tungsten, chosen as it provides the necessary density in a confined space. “For a watchmaker, the difficulties of working on such a small movement are comparable to an extra-thin calibre,” Christian Lattmann insists. “It takes enormous precision and expertise. Casing the movement has to be done right first time as repolishing would run the risk of altering the shape. The watchmaker therefore has to work carefully and precisely, taking as much time as required. Behind this apparent simplicity, there is a long history of watchmaking know-how.”
At first glance, the Blancpain Lady B has a simple, almost elementary form. A polished sphere that feels soft to the touch. There are no lugs. Instead, the strap threads directly through the bottom of the case to create a continuous visual line.
This spherical shape, which has echoes of an Anish Kapoor sculpture, came about through extensive research into volumes, materialised in a succession of wax sculptures, before settling on the final proportions. A specially developed system of clamps secures the movement inside the case to preserve the watch’s architecture and its slim profile.
Light dances across the surfaces, including the polished rehaut which lends greater depth to this tiny sphere that appears as a single, uninterrupted volume.
A watch envisioned as a collection
The Blancpain Lady B launches with a strap in a choice of seven colours — white, beige, mocha, coral, burgundy, purple or blue — that transforms its personality without altering its architecture. “We’re already looking at other developments. We could add black to the palette while the very nature of the watch paves the way for versions with a stronger jewellery aesthetic, such as a gem-set case, a precious bracelet or complications,” Christian Lattmann shares.
Despite a rich history of women’s watches, Blancpain is known more for its grand complications, its men’s watches and, above all, its dive watches. The Blancpain Lady B brings an instantly identifiable visual language that comes neither from the feminisation of a men’s model nor from copying an archival design.
It circles back to something Betty Fiechter understood early on: a women’s watch can have its own raison d’être, its own proportions and its own aesthetic, without foregoing mechanical intent. How far can horology be pushed to create a mechanical timepiece that is truly designed for women? The Blancpain Lady B answers that question and gives Blancpain a vast sphere to explore.
