Mickaël Gaspar’s Souscription Makes Its Case for the Next Wave of Independent Watchmaking

Mickaël Gaspar arrives with the sort of first watch that tells you exactly where his priorities sit.

The Souscription is a 39.9mm stainless steel wristwatch with a retrograde date and an inverted movement architecture, putting much of the mechanical drama on the dial side rather than hiding it under the caseback.

For a 29-year-old French watchmaker with a serious complications background, it’s a debut that feels deliberately personal rather than broadly commercial.

At a glance

• Mickaël Gaspar has launched the Souscription, his first wristwatch, in a 20-piece numbered edition.
• The watch features a dial-side exposed movement, retrograde date, hand-finished components and a rose-gold-plated mainplate.
• It is priced at CHF 69,000 excluding taxes and is backed by the independent watchmaking incubator Ateliers Associés.

A school watch rebuilt for a first collection

The Souscription began life long before it carried Gaspar’s name.

Its roots go back to his time at Lycée Edgar Faure in Morteau, the French watchmaking school linked with names including Sylvain Pinaud, Théo Auffret, Rémy Cools and Cyril Brivet-Naudot.

Between the ages of 17 and 19, Gaspar developed a school watch built around a retrograde date and a visible movement, two elements that now form the backbone of his first signed piece.

The production Souscription is not presented as a straight student-watch revival.

A decade later, the idea has been rebuilt from the ground up as a finished wristwatch for collectors, with its mechanics, layout and finishing brought into sharper focus.

Gaspar’s path helps explain the confidence of the execution.

He is the great-grandson of a watchmaker who spent four decades at Lip, won a silver medal as a Meilleur Apprenti de France, then joined Breitling as one of three apprentices selected from a field of fifty.

He later spent four years at Sellita before joining MH Horlogerie in Les Brenets, where he became partner and head of workshop.

That role placed him around the kind of work that tends to shape a young watchmaker quickly, including flying tourbillons, fusée-and-chain systems, minute repeaters and natural escapements.

An exposed movement with a strong architectural dial

The case is stainless steel and measures 39.9mm across, with a total thickness of 13mm.

A highly domed sapphire crystal gives the watch much of its visual character, opening the view across the dial-side movement and enhancing the depth of the construction.

The case itself is kept relatively restrained, with a mirror-polished bevel running around the case band.

That restraint is useful because the main event is under the crystal.

The Souscription uses an inverted, deconstructed movement layout with a hand-sandblasted mainplate plated in rose gold.

Against that warm surface sit steel and rhodium-plated components, giving the watch the familiar high-contrast language often associated with modern independent watchmaking, but with enough asymmetry to feel distinct.

The hands remain centrally placed, while the visible indications and mechanisms build the composition around them.

The retrograde date sector sits at 12 o’clock, the balance is positioned between seven and eight o’clock, and the small seconds appears at 4 o’clock beneath a bridge that visually echoes the balance bridge.

Gaspar also gives the watch a practical low-light detail that isn’t immediately obvious from the layout.

The date numerals, seconds, chapter ring and hands are filled with Super-LumiNova, while the black-polished hands are curved by hand.

Hand work around a modified Swiss base

The movement is built from an undisclosed modified Swiss base plate and gear train, used to power the retrograde date mechanism Gaspar designed as a student.

Gaspar reworks much of what surrounds that foundation.

The wheel staffs and pinions are turned on a traditional lathe, certain wheels are cut in Les Brenets, the balance wheel is made and balanced in the atelier, and the Breguet overcoil is formed and pinned by hand.

The dial-side architecture exposes the retrograde mechanism, which means the back is not crowded with the usual visual focal points.

Instead, Gaspar uses curved gold-coated bridges to animate the caseback view.

Those bridges are hand-finished with sandblasted surfaces and mirror-polished bevels, maintaining the same finishing vocabulary as the front of the watch.

Each Souscription is said to require around 250 hours of machining and hand-finishing.

The movement runs at 18,000 vibrations per hour and offers a 46-hour power reserve.

Ateliers Associés gives the project a wider platform

The Souscription is also the first project from Ateliers Associés, a Swiss incubator founded by William Massena of Massena LAB and Louis Westphalen-Lemaitre, who previously worked with Breitling and participated in the relaunch of Daniel Roth and Gerald Genta under La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton.

The concept is aimed at a recurring problem in independent watchmaking.

A watchmaker working alone may have the skill to make exceptional watches, but not the time or infrastructure to handle technical development, sourcing, production, after-sales, imagery, press, pricing, allocation and collector relationships at the same time.

Ateliers Associés plans to support four new independent watchmakers by building that broader team around them.

For Gaspar, it allows the hours to remain at the bench, where this particular watch clearly wants them.

Details & Specifications

As a first wristwatch, the Souscription is not trying to be neutral.

It’s a mechanical calling card for collectors who follow young independent makers closely and are drawn to watches where the maker’s hand, training and obsessions remain visible on the surface.