Photo Barbara Depraz ©
In the heights of Gruyère, where the seasons shape the landscape, Barbara Depraz grew up among the mountains… and among possibilities. She did not yet know that, at 30, an accident would wipe out everything: precise movement, fluent thought, and the certainty of tomorrow. Nor did she know that she would win it all back, one step at a time. Through it all, one refrain remained: “You always have to believe.”
Born in Fribourg to a Tuscan father and a Fribourg-born mother, Barbara Depraz grew up straddling two worlds, two languages and two cultures, and very early on inherited a dual perspective: rooted yet open. But it was above all with her grandparents, who ran a hotel in Moléson, that her imagination took shape. There, in this vibrant microcosm, travellers from all over the world crossed paths. “I played with children from every culture,” she recalls. A cosmopolitan, almost timeless childhood, which stood in sharp contrast to returning to school, where she discovered the röstigraben at an early age. “I couldn’t understand why people would put up barriers between one another.” However subtle it may have been, that shock already forged a deep conviction and placed her in a singular position she would claim throughout her life.
After boarding school in German-speaking Switzerland and gymnasium at Collège Gambach in Fribourg, Barbara turned to finance, completed one programme after another and worked at a trust company. A clear, orderly, promising path. Then, at 30, everything changed: a serious car accident, head trauma, cognitive impairments, fine motor difficulties, and a decade spent rebuilding what had once seemed secure. The simplest gestures became challenges. “I could no longer pick up coins.”
What followed was a quiet, methodical, almost scientific battle. First, through movement: she enrolled at the Athenaeum School in Lausanne to study interior architecture, not out of vocation, but to force her hand to hold a pencil and draw a straight line. “I got incredibly frustrated,” she admits. But she persisted, until she recovered her precision and control, earning a diploma along the way. Then came the rebuilding of the mind. To discipline her failing memory and channel her scattered thoughts, she turned to psychology at UniDistance. A discipline demanding in its rigour and density, it transformed memorisation into genuine cognitive rehabilitation. She trained morning and evening, like a top-level athlete, to read a sentence and retain its meaning to the very end. Over the months, connections gradually reformed, paving the way to a full recovery and revealing the brilliant strategist she is today.
Those years of rehabilitation were not just years of withdrawal. In parallel, she developed a passion for SMEs, observing and advising discreetly. “The SME world is a fascinating microcosm,” she says — a space where everything can turn quickly, for better or worse. That is the universe in which she found her footing.
In 2017, she was hired as Head of Finance and Human Resources at Tech-Laser Sandoz SA, a metalworking and laser-cutting company based in Villeneuve. A year later, she was given the top job. At the helm of around thirty employees, Barbara Depraz did more than manage: she put her own stamp on the business. She literally opened the doors of industry to visitors, to young people, to anyone who still believes metalworking is done with a hammer and an anvil. “Our worlds are extraordinary, but people no longer know them. We’re not in Germinal.” She wants to reconnect industry with society, to show the modernity, precision and intelligence of these professions — an approach likely inherited from her childhood, from that hotel where everyone came in, where differences were not obstacles but assets. She brings an inclusive management style, grounded in kindness and innovation. Her background in psychology is not a detour; it is the core of her approach.
Always available, committed to her work as well as to many causes (Swissmem, GIM, co-president of GEC, board member of the Cercle des Administratrices, committee member of Yverdon Sport Féminin, and many others), she sometimes forgets herself in the process. Those around her remind her that slowing down matters too. But slowing down has never driven her. For this hands-on woman, who enjoys flirting with speed on the racetrack, life is lived at a brisk pace. Make no mistake, though: her taste for speed is never synonymous with haste. Every decision, every turn in her life, is negotiated with the surgical precision of a racing driver. As a child, she dreamed of “conquering territories,” discovering the world, managing grand hotels. Though the paths diverged, the impulse remained intact. Today, she explores other territories: those of business, people and transformation.
But behind this relentless pace and overflowing energy, there is above all a woman of heart. Her generosity and sense of listening make her a point of reference for those around her, always ready to commit fully to others. To recharge her own batteries and feed the inner fire that both consumes and drives her, she has created her own sanctuaries. The first is wild and solitary: it is in the raw silence of nature that she comes to calm the turmoil of her thoughts. She walks forest paths to ground herself, seeks the vastness of the mountains to gain perspective, and lets the serenity of the lake soothe her back to calm. It is there, far from the noise of the world, that she draws the almost organic resilience that defines her. But her other great source of strength is otherness. This hands-on woman does not conceive of success in a vacuum. A true relational chameleon, endowed with rare empathy, Barbara Depraz finds immense strength in authentic exchange with her peers. For her, networking is not just an address book; it is a living ecosystem. Every encounter becomes a strategic mirror, a space for unfiltered sharing and a catalyst for ideas. In those moments of professional complicity, an alchemy takes hold: she finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration there, enriched by others’ experience, with the same generosity she gives in return.
It is in this balance between rootedness and openness that her trajectory takes shape. The little Heidi of the mountains never really left Moléson — she simply changed peaks. Today, at the head of Tech-Laser Sandoz, Barbara Depraz knows better than anyone that life’s contours never soften, but the way we look at them can change everything. There will always be steep slopes, blind turns, moments of silence when everything seems suspended. And yet, somewhere, a glimmer endures — a discreet, almost secret light that appears only to those who choose to keep going. Her journey bears the mark of that: a crossing, more than an ascent. And at the heart of that crossing, one truth: believe, even without seeing; move forward, even without certainty; and let the light, deep within, open the way.
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