Blancpain

Blancpain was born in 1735 in Villeret, a small village in the Swiss Jura, where Jehan-Jacques Blancpain started his watchmaking business on the upper floor of his home. It is the oldest registered watch brand still in existence: for two centuries the business remained in the hands of the same family, before passing in 1932 to Betty Fiechter, among the first women to head a Swiss watchmaking manufacture, and later to Jean-Jacques Fiechter, under whose leadership the celebrated Fifty Fathoms of 1953 was born.

Like much of the mechanical watch industry, Blancpain went through a critical phase in the 1970s, when the spread of quartz watches brought traditional Swiss manufacturers to their knees; for a period the brand ended up producing only movements on behalf of others, including Omega. The rebirth came in 1983, when Jacques Piguet and Jean-Claude Biver took over the Blancpain name — by then reduced to a mere brand with no production of its own — and rebuilt it from scratch in Le Brassus, in the Vallée de Joux, betting everything on mechanical watchmaking at a time when almost no one still believed in it.

From that choice came the motto that has accompanied the brand ever since: Blancpain has never made a quartz watch and states it never intends to. In 1992 the brand joined the group that would become the Swatch Group, while keeping its own independent manufacture; since 2002 the brand has been led by Marc Hayek, grandson of Nicolas Hayek, founder of the group, who still guides its development today between classical high watchmaking and its diving heritage.