1990s Blancpain Villeret 18ct Yellow Gold 34mm 0021-1418
Ref: 0021-1418

Jehan-Jacques Blancpain founded his watch business in 1735, utilising the upper floor of his farmhouse as a workshop in Villeret, Switzerland. His son, David-Louis Blancpain (1765-1816), was committed to growing his father's business by travelling often through Europe, in particular to France and Germany, selling and delivering Blancpain watches. Frédéric-Louis handed the company to his son, Frédéric-Emile, when he was just 19 years old due to his bad health. The company became known as 'E. Blancpain’. Emile achieved remarkable success, building the business into the largest and most effective enterprise in Villeret. Frédéric-Emile, the grandson, continued heading the company until 1932. During his later years, he was joined in 1915 by Betty Fiechter, who assisted him in running the business. She joined the company as an apprentice when she was just 16, and quickly, her responsibilities at Blancpain grew to become head of manufacturing and commercial development. Frédéric-Emile was so confident in her skills and talent that he started training her to take on responsibility for production and become the director of the company, which was an incredible achievement for a woman during that time period. In 1926, the company entered into a partnership with John Harwood, a British watchmaker who had produced the first self-winding wristwatch, obtaining a Swiss patent in 1924. With Betty Fiechter as the director, Blancpain had to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. One such way was to open their movement supply to other brands. In this period, Blancpain became a supplier of Gruen, Elgin and Hamilton, among many others. She was joined in 1950 by her nephew Jean-Jacques Fiechter, who had a key role in the development of the Fifty Fathoms, the world’s first modern diving watch, which debuted in 1953. Collaborating with the French combat divers, Jean-Jacques promoted its widespread adoption by many navies around the world, and it was also used by the famous explorer Jacques Cousteau and his team. In 1961, the company merged into the largest Swiss watch group, the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH), where they joined Omega, Tissot and Lemania. Inside this Group, they saw huge growth, even building new facilities and production soaring to more than 220,000 pieces by 1971. This growth was not to last, as a combination of events hit at once. First, we saw the fall of the dollar against the Swiss franc, which reduced their transatlantic exports. Second, a serious oil crisis triggered a worldwide recession. To top it all off, the entire Swiss watchmaking industry was severely hit by the huge growth in imports of quartz watches from Japan, referred to as "the quartz crisis.” The Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) seriously needed a new strategy, so it decided to build its own quartz watches rather than mechanical ones. In 1993, it sold the Rayville-Blancpain name to Frédéric Piguet, a partnership between Jacques Piguet and Jean-Claude Biver, who was then an employee of SSIH. The new company traded under the name of Blancpain SA and set up production in an old building belonging to the Piguet family at Le Brassus, in the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland. In 1991, Blancpain presented the most complicated wristwatch in the world at the time: the 1735 Grande Complication. This incredible timepiece featured a one-minute tourbillon regulator, a perpetual calendar with moon phases and moon age, a co-axial split-seconds chronograph and a minute repeater activated by the slide on the band. A watchmaker master worked over ten months on the Blancpain 1735 Grande Complication, which had a production run of just 30 pieces from 1991 to 2009. In 1992, the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) bought Blancpain SA back for 60 million Swiss Francs (more than 1000 times the amount paid for the brand in 1983). During this time, SSIH and ASUAG—the two largest Swiss watch groups—merged into the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries Ltd. (SMH). SMH was later renamed The Swatch Group in 1998. Jean-Claude Biver remained CEO of the company until 2003.