Description
Blancpain has marked seventy years of the Ladybird not with a reissue but with a new idea. The Lady B is a tiny sphere of polished metal — 19 mm across, 13.2 mm deep, with no lugs at all — worn on a slim double-wrap leather strap. It comes in stainless steel or 18k red gold, it is part of the permanent collection rather than a limited run, and it opens at CHF 9,500.
The point is what is inside. At a size where most brands reach for a quartz module, Blancpain has built a new in-house automatic, calibre 615: 15.7 mm across, 3.9 mm thick, 180 components, a silicon balance spring and 38 hours of reserve. The Lady B is jewellery in form, but it is a proper piece of mechanical watchmaking in substance.
Design
The case is a two-part, lugless sphere with a volume of just 2.9 cm³, fully polished so it reads as a single pebble of steel or gold. The strap passes beneath the case rather than attaching to lugs. On the dial, a warm opaline surface carries applied gold baton indexes and polished hands, with the metal of the markers matched to the case: red gold on the gold model, grey gold on steel.
The strap is a 10 mm calfskin double-tour that wraps the wrist twice and closes with a pin buckle in the case metal, and it is offered in a range of colours from white and beige through burgundy, blue and purple. Seen on the wrist, the watch sits somewhere between a bracelet charm and a watch — which is exactly the Ladybird's original brief.
Specifications
- Collection: Blancpain Lady B (Ladybird 70th anniversary)
- Case: 19 mm diameter, 13.2 mm height; spherical, lugless, two-part construction; case volume 2.9 cm³
- Case material: polished stainless steel or 18k red gold
- Dial: opaline, applied gold baton indexes (grey gold on steel, red gold on the gold model), polished hands
- Functions: hours and minutes
- Movement: Blancpain calibre 615, in-house, automatic
- Movement size: 15.7 mm diameter, 3.9 mm thick; 180 components, 29 jewels
- Balance spring: silicon
- Frequency: 21,600 vph (3 Hz)
- Power reserve: 38 hours
- Strap: 10 mm calfskin double-tour strap with pin buckle in the case metal; several colours
- Edition: permanent collection, not limited
- Price: CHF 9,500 (steel), CHF 14,500 (18k red gold); US$12,600 / US$19,200
- Availability: from 17 September 2026
What's Exciting
The easy anniversary move would have been a faithful Ladybird reissue with a bought-in or quartz movement. Blancpain did the harder thing and engineered a new in-house automatic at 15.7 mm — with a silicon hairspring and 180 parts — for a watch whose entire case is smaller than most men's movements. That is a meaningful investment in a category the industry too often treats as decoration.
The design is equally confident. A lugless sphere on a double-wrap strap is not a scaled-down men's watch; it is a new object that happens to tell the time, and at CHF 9,500 in steel it is also one of the more accessible ways into an in-house Blancpain calibre. Our only reservation is the 38-hour reserve — acceptable for a watch this small, but something wearers will notice if it lives in a drawer.
History
The Ladybird debuted in 1956 under Betty Fiechter, who had joined Blancpain in 1912 as a teenager and went on to lead the company — often cited as the first woman to own and lead a Swiss watchmaking company. Its R55 movement measured just 11.85 mm across, achieved by adding a fifth wheel to the gear train, and Blancpain called it the smallest round mechanical movement ever mass-produced; period advertisements billed the Ladybird as the smallest round watch in the world.
The Lady B takes the 1956 Ladybird "Bullet" as its inspiration but reinterprets rather than copies it: where the original was about miniaturising a conventional watch, the new one uses a new movement to justify an entirely new case shape.
