Blancpain produces around 20,000 watches per year. This is less than half the production of its competitors such as Audemars Piguet or Patek Philippe. Blancpain is most famous for the Fifty Fathoms model, which was the world’s first modern dive watch when launched in 1953.

Since 1992, Blancpain has been owned by the Swatch Group, which also has a number of other Swiss watch brands in its portfolio, including Omega, Breguet, Longines, Tissot, Rado and Glashutte Original. Jean-Claude Biver, one of the more colorful personalities in the watch industry, ran Blancpain from 1992 until 2003 when Marc Hayek, the grandson of the Swatch Group’s founder Nicolas Hayek, took over.

Blancpain is considered to be the oldest watch brand in the world and was founded in 1735 by Jehan-Jacques Blancpain in the Swiss village of Villeret. After being family owned and operated for almost two centuries, Betty Fiechter took the helm during the tumultuous 1930’s as one of the only female executives in a traditionally male dominated industry. She came to Blancpain as an apprentice and rose through the ranks to become CEO, a remarkable achievement at the time. In 1950 Betty Fiechter was succeeded by her nephew, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, who made his mark with the development of the Fifty Fathoms model.

The Fifty Fathoms was initially developed because the CEO at the time, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, was an avid SCUBA diver and wanted a watch that could accompany him on his diving expeditions. While the original idea was more of a personal passion project, the watch was soon adopted by the French Navy and world-famous marine explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who wore the watch during his Oscar-winning underwater documentary “The Silent World” which quickly propelled the Fifty Fathoms to international cult status.

Ever since the introduction of the Fifty Fathoms model back in 1953, Blancpain has had a longstanding connection to diving and the ocean. As a direct result of this connection, the company established its Ocean Commitment program to aid in the restoration of the world’s oceans and to raise awareness through ocean exploration. Blancpain supports major scientific ocean expeditions and is a founding supporter of the World Ocean Summit. In addition, Blancpain has donated 1,000 Euro for each limited-edition Ocean Commitment timepiece it has sold since the launch of the first model in 2014.