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This text is a part of Neglected, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Occasions.
In September, Swatch launched a gaggle of watches in collaboration with the venerable model Blancpain: the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms assortment, which, the corporate mentioned, “met all of the wants of underwater exploration.”
The unique Fifty Fathoms — launched by Blancpain in 1953 and nonetheless an anchor of the model — was groundbreaking: It was thought of to be the primary trendy divers’ watch, with water resistance of as much as about 300 toes. And it wouldn’t have been created with out a lady who was equally trailblazing: Betty Fiechter, the primary feminine proprietor of a Swiss watch home in a historically male trade.
Fiechter (pronounced FEESH-tehr), who had began out as an apprentice, rose to the highest at Blancpain in 1933. “It was completely unprecedented,” mentioned Pascal Ravessoud, a vice chairman of the Swiss commerce group the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. “It will have been twice as laborious for a lady to struggle her method via.”
In her 30-year tenure at Blancpain, which was acquired by Swatch in 1992, Fiechter held quite a lot of positions, together with president and normal director (titles she held concurrently), and oversaw the creation of a number of the firm’s most profitable watches.
She positioned an emphasis on ladies’s timepieces, just like the slim and stylish Rolls, the primary computerized watch designed for ladies, created in 1930, and the Ladybird, a fragile 1956 piece thought of on the time to have the smallest spherical watch motion, or inside mechanism. (Marilyn Monroe was famously a fan of Blancpain’s female creations.)
Fiechter managed the corporate with a dominating presence and shepherded it via tough eras, together with the Nice Melancholy and World Battle II, with progressive gross sales strategies.
Berthe Marie Fiechter was born on April 29, 1896, in Villeret, Switzerland, a middle of Swiss watchmaking for the reason that 1600s. Her father, Jacob Fiechter, was an proprietor of an organization that made watch actions. (It was bought to Blancpain in 1914.) Her mom, Mary Lisa (Ramseyer) Fiechter, raised Betty and her 5 siblings.
Betty attended vocational college close to Villeret and was employed by Blancpain as an apprentice in 1912, when she was 16. For seven generations, beginning in 1735, Blancpain had been owned by the household that based it. Betty labored alongside its final remaining member of the family, Frédéric-Emile Blancpain.
The expectation on the time would have been for her to finally tackle a secretarial or administrative position with the corporate, however Frédéric-Emile Blancpain “noticed extra in her and in addition pushed her to be extra,” Jean-Marie Fiechter, Betty Fiechter’s great-nephew, mentioned in an interview.
“She hadn’t had college schooling — no M.B.A., or no matter — however she was road good,” he added. “She knew how the watch firm ought to work.”
Blancpain implicitly trusted Fiechter, who usually labored with out him by her facet; she would run the model’s watch manufacturing operation whereas he was at his house in Lausanne, about 60 miles southwest of Villeret, the Swiss city the place Blancpain was based mostly on the time. To maintain him up to date, she would ship him weekly stories on wax cylinders that have been performed on phonographs — basically the equal of a leaving voice mail messages — and he would ship again his personal recorded replies.
When Blancpain died in 1932, his solely daughter selected not to enter the enterprise. So Fiechter and her boyfriend, André Léal, who additionally labored on the firm, took over, with Fiechter changing into its chief government and Léal serving because the gross sales director.
(Due to Swiss laws concerning model possession, they launched a lot of their new watches underneath the model identify Rayville-Blancpain, till 1960.)
Fiechter’s tenure included difficult durations, like World Battle II, however she got here up with creative methods for the corporate to outlive. Throughout the Melancholy, for instance, when the Purchase American Act of 1933 required federal businesses to purchase home items, she exported nearly-finished watches to america, the place the instances and closing elements could be added. At one level, she additionally prioritized promoting watch actions to different watch manufacturers in america.
However Fiechter’s focus remained on the model — its survival and success.
She put every little thing she had into Blancpain, mentioned Jeffrey Kingston, one among two editors in chief of Lettres du Brassus, {a magazine} that the watch model publishes, for which he wrote a profile of Fiechter in 2021.
“Mainly, Blancpain grew to become her household,” he mentioned. “It was her entire life. She by no means married, she had no kids, so her entire existence wrapped round Blancpain.”
In 1961, Blancpain joined an alliance of watch manufacturers, the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère, and Fiechter grew to become a member of its board. The partnership enabled her firm to make an enormous quantity of watch actions for different member manufacturers, like Omega and Tissot.
Standing about six toes tall, Fiechter towered over a lot of her male colleagues and anticipated them to be as tireless as she was. On one among her each day visits to the model’s watchmaking atelier, for instance, she noticed an worker taking a cigarette break and shortly docked the employee’s pay.
That wasn’t her solely eccentricity. She generally shopped on Lausanne’s ritzy Rue du Bourg in her mink coat, accessorized by fluffy pink bed room slippers. One afternoon in Villeret, she walked right into a magnificence salon and demanded — and received — service, though the hairdresser was with one other consumer; she then left halfway via the session to take care of a urgent matter on the workplace, with curlers nonetheless on her head.
“She completely didn’t care,” her great-nephew mentioned. “If it was proper for her, it was proper for her, interval.”
When Léal died all of a sudden in 1939, Fiechter grew to become Blancpain’s sole proprietor. By about 1950, she had been identified with most cancers and introduced in a nephew, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, to assist her run the corporate. (His love of diving helped encourage the event of Fifty Fathoms.)
Fiechter’s sickness went into remission for nearly 20 years, however a closing bout led to her loss of life, on Sept. 14, 1971. She was 75.
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