This article is part of overlookeda series of obituaries beginning in 1851 about prominent people whose deaths were not reported in the Times.
In September, Swatch unveiled the Bioceramic Scuba Fifty Fathoms collection, a series of watches in collaboration with the venerable brand Blancpain. According to the company, this “meets all your underwater exploration needs.”
The original Fifty Fathoms, introduced by Blancpain in 1953 and still a staple of the brand, was a breakthrough. It was considered the first modern diver's watch to be water resistant up to approximately 300 feet. And this watch would not have been born without the women who were also pioneers. Betty Fichter is the first female owner of a traditionally male-dominated Swiss watch brand.
Starting out as an apprentice, Fichter (pronounced fi-sh-teer) rose to the top at Blancpain in 1933. “It was completely unprecedented,” said Pascal Lavesoude, vice president of the Swiss trade group Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. . “It would have been twice as hard for a woman to fight through.”
During his 30-year tenure at Blancpain, which was acquired by Swatch in 1992, Fichter held various positions, including president and general director, and oversaw the production of some of the company's most successful watches.
She admired the slim and elegant Rolls, created in 1930, the first automatic watch designed for women, and the delicate 1956, which was considered to have the smallest circular watch movement or internal mechanism at the time. The focus was on women's watches, such as the 2016 Lady Bird. . (Marilyn Monroe was famously a fan of Blancpain's feminine pieces.)
Fichter ran the company with a commanding presence, using innovative sales methods to get the company through difficult times such as the Great Depression and World War II.
Bert Marie Fichter was born on April 29, 1896 in Villeret, Switzerland, a center of Swiss watchmaking since the 1600s. Her father, Jacob Fichter, owned a company that manufactured watch movements. (Sold to Blancpain in 1914.) Her mother, Mary Lisa (Ramseyer) Fichter, raised Betty and her five siblings.
Betty attended a technical school near Villeret, and in 1912, at the age of 16, she was hired as an apprentice by Blancpain. Since 1735 and for seven generations, Blancpain has been owned by the founding family. Betty worked alongside the last remaining family member, Frédéric Emile Blancpain.
Expectations at the time were that she would eventually take up a company secretary or managerial position, but Frédéric-Emile Blancpain “saw in her much more, and that she would become even more than that.” “I had my back on her,” said Jean-Marie Pfister, Betty Pfister's great figure. – The nephew said this in an interview.
“She didn't have a college education, she didn't have an MBA or anything, but she was street smart,” he added. “She knew how a watch company should work.”
Blancpain trusted Fichter implicitly, and Fichter often worked without him. She ended up running the brand's watchmaking operations while from her home in Lausanne, about 90 miles southwest of the Swiss town of Villeret, where Blancpain was based at the time. To keep him informed, she sent him weekly reports on the wax cylinders played on the phonograph. This was essentially the same as leaving a voicemail message. And he sent back his own recorded reply.
When Blancpain died in 1932, his only daughter chose not to work in the business, so Fichter and her boyfriend Andre Real, who also worked for the company, took over, with Fichter becoming CEO. , Real served as sales manager.
(Due to Swiss regulations regarding brand ownership, new watches were released under the Rayville Blancpain brand name until 1960.)
Ms. Fichter's tenure included difficult times, such as World War II, but she came up with creative ways to help the company survive. For example, during the Great Depression, when the Buy American Act of 1933 required federal agencies to purchase domestic products, she exported nearly completed watches to the United States, where cases and final parts were added. . At one point, she prioritized selling watch movements to other watch brands in the United States.
But Fichter's focus remained on the brand – its survival and success.
She gave everything she had to Blancpain, said Jeffrey Kingston, editor-in-chief of the watch brand's Lettres du Brassus magazine, who wrote a profile of Ms. Fichter in 2021.
“Basically, Blancpain became her family,” he said. “That was her whole life. She never married and had no children, so her whole being was wrapped up in Blancpain.”
In 1961, Blancpain joined the Swiss Watch Industry Association, an association of watch brands, and Fichter became a member of its board of directors. This partnership has enabled her company to manufacture large quantities of watch movements for other member brands such as Omega and Tissot.
At about 6 feet tall, Fichter towered over many of her male colleagues and expected them to be as tireless as she was. For example, during her daily visits to the brand's watchmaking atelier, she discovered employees taking cigarette breaks, and she immediately withheld their wages.
That wasn't the only strange behavior she had. She sometimes wore a mink coat and fluffy pink bedroom slippers while shopping on Lausanne's upscale Rue du Bourg. One afternoon in Villeret, she entered a beauty salon and requested her services, which she received, even though the hairdresser was with another customer. She then left in the middle of the session to attend to a pressing matter in her office, leaving the curlers on her head.
“She didn't care at all,” her great-nephew said. “If it’s right for her, it’s right for her.”
After Real's sudden death in 1939, Fichter became Blancpain's sole owner. By about 1950, she was diagnosed with cancer and brought in her nephew Jean-Jacques Fichter to help run her company. (His love of diving helped inspire the development of Fifty Her Fathoms.)
Fichter's illness was in remission for almost 20 years, but his final attack led to his death on September 14, 1971. She was 75 years old.
