Seventy years after Betty Fiechter built the world’s smallest round movement, Blancpain has reworked her Ladybird idea into a spherical mechanical jewel called Blancpain Lady B.
There is a version of watchmaking history that gets told and retold: complications, chronometers, the men who ran the great houses. Betty Fiechter rarely features in it, despite having done more than most to keep one of them afloat. In 1932, Frédéric Émile Blancpain died suddenly, ending two centuries of family leadership at the Villeret manufacture. With no heir willing to take over, Fiechter and commercial director André Léal borrowed heavily to buy the company. Swiss law at the time would not let a firm trade under the Blancpain name without a family member at its head, so the business became Rayville, a phonetic anagram of Villeret. Léal died just before the Second World War, leaving Fiechter alone at the helm of more than 200 employees, at a time when Swiss women could not yet vote.
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