The Woman Who Saved Blancpain, and the Watch Named After Her

Blancpain has released the Lady B, a 19mm watch marking seventy years of the Ladybird collection, in steel at 12,600 dollars and red gold at 19,200. It has no lugs, the strap passes through the case and wraps twice around the wrist, and the whole watch occupies under three cubic centimetres.

Source: Hodinkee.com

The B stands for bullet, which was the nickname of the 1956 original, and for bijou. It also stands for Betty, and hers is the name worth knowing.

Betty Fiechter

Betty Fiechter started at Blancpain in 1912 at the age of sixteen. In 1932 the owner, Frédéric-Emile Blancpain, died suddenly, and the company that had been in the same family since 1735 had no successor willing to take it on.

Fiechter was thirty-six. Together with the commercial director André Léal she raised loans and bought the business outright, which made her, as far as anyone can establish, the first woman to own and run a Swiss watch manufacture.

Source: Hodinkee.com

Swiss law then handed her a problem. The rules governing company names meant that only a member of the Blancpain family could trade under it, so the woman who had just saved Blancpain was forbidden from calling it Blancpain. She renamed the manufacture Rayville, an anagram of Villeret, the village where it had always been.

Put that in context. She was running a Swiss company thirty-nine years before Swiss women were allowed to vote in federal elections. She kept it alive through the Depression and the war, then brought in her nephew Jean-Jacques Fiechter, and between them they produced the Fifty Fathoms in 1953 and the Ladybird in 1956, which remain the two pillars the brand stands on today.

The Smallest Round Movement Ever Made

The Ladybird existed because of a movement called the R55, and it still holds its record as the smallest round mechanical movement ever built.

 

Small movements are difficult for reasons that compound. A smaller mainspring stores less energy, so you have less power to work with, and at the same time every pivot and bearing keeps roughly the same friction it would have in a larger calibre. The margins shrink while the losses stay put. Tolerances that a big movement absorbs without complaint become the difference between running and stopping, and a tiny balance wheel carries so little inertia that the watch loses timekeeping stability.

 

The R55 answered that with an extra wheel in the train to limit the force reaching the escapement and a shock protection system on the balance, at a time when women's watches were routinely fragile and treated as jewellery that happened to tell time. Making the smallest movement in the world and then engineering it to survive being worn was the actual achievement.

Source: Hodinkee.com

The New One

The Lady B measures 19mm across and 13.2mm thick, which is close to as tall as it is wide, and the proportion works because the watch is meant to sit like a bead on a wrist instead of lying flat on one.

 

There are no lugs. The strap threads directly through the case, which is why the calfskin is only 1.6mm thick and why the inside of the pass-through is micro-blasted, since a rough channel would chew through a strap that thin. The edges are hand-finished for the same reason. It wraps twice, in a 10mm width, and comes in six colours.

 

Inside is the Blancpain 615, an automatic measuring 15.7mm by 3.9mm, running at 3Hz with a silicon hairspring and 38 hours of reserve. Automatic winding at this scale is a meaningful step up from the hand-wound original, and there is no display back, since the strap runs through where it would be. Water resistance is 30 metres. The dial shows hours and minutes and nothing else, which is the only sane decision available on a dial this size.

Who This Is For

Small watches are back, and the demand is coming from women who remember the cocktail watches their mothers and grandmothers wore and cannot find anything like them being made now. Cartier proved the market with the Baignoire, and this sits about three thousand dollars above it with a mechanical movement instead of quartz.

Source: Hodinkee.com

Anyone cross-shopping those two on price is missing the point of both. This is jewellery with a movement in it, bought for how it looks on a wrist, and the mechanical content is what separates it from a bracelet.

What I like is that the story attached is true. Plenty of brands dedicate a women's line to a founder's wife or a muse who never held a position. Blancpain has named this one after a sixteen-year-old apprentice who ended up owning the company, rescuing it, and losing the right to use its name in the process.