teliers Associés has been launched by William Massena and Louis Westphalen-Lemaitre. Every year, this incubator gives four new independent watchmakers the money and the team to turn a first watch into a house that lasts. Its first partnership brings a watch ready to be revealed, and collaborations with three further ateliers are in development for 2027.

Mickaël Gaspar, 29, a French watchmaker, will reveal his first wristwatch on Thursday 12 November at the Private View of Iamwatch in Singapore, the fair The Hour Glass devotes to independent watchmaking. The Souscription, a retrograde date with the movement on the dial side, began as his school project and took ten years to bring to a series. Twenty pieces, each numbered on the dial, are offered by subscription for delivery from the first quarter of 2027.

Independent watchmaking has never had more attention. The F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition has been finding and funding young watchmakers for over a decade, the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize has brought international attention and mentorship, and the GPHG has made room for new names beside the established houses. Watchmakers who were students just five years ago now run their own ateliers.

Ateliers Associés starts where the prizes stop. A prize recognises one watchmaker, once. Ateliers Associés backs four new ateliers every year, a new group each year, and stays with each of them through the years that follow, when a promising watchmaker either becomes a lasting name or quietly disappears. It funds the first prototype, takes a minority stake in the venture it helps build, and remains alongside the watchmaker through the second collection and the ones after it. Alongside the four ateliers, it develops one creative collaboration a year with a discipline from outside watchmaking.

A watchmaker working alone cannot carry a team with experience of every step between a drawing and a delivered watch. Ateliers Associés builds that team once and makes it available to every watchmaker it backs: technical development and prototyping, industrialisation and quality, sourcing and suppliers, production and after-sales, brand, imagery and press, pricing, allocation and the collector relationship worldwide. The watchmaker’s hours go to the bench, and to the watches only he can make.

What is learned for one venture is available to the next. Each year an established independent watchmaker joins as mentor to the new arrivals, in the spirit of compagnonnage, the guild tradition in which a master forms a journeyman. The stake Ateliers Associés takes is deliberately minority: the watchmaker keeps the name, the designs, the calibres and control of the company. Independence is the point, and the structure exists to protect it.

Ateliers Associés is financed by its founders and a first circle of private investors and collectors. For 2027, a dedicated vehicle to fund prototypes and first series is being structured; a small number of places remain, by introduction, for partners who share the founders’ view of the craft. Investors take part in the ventures alongside the watchmakers, never in place of them.

Mickaël Gaspar has spent ten years on one idea: a watch that shows how it works. The retrograde date was the display he designed as a student in Morteau because he wanted a dial that moves, where someone who knows nothing about watchmaking can look, understand and enjoy.

Twelve years on, he has perfected that complication: in the Souscription, the balance and the retrograde date sit beneath a domed crystal that works like a watchmaker’s loupe. He had not planned to put his name on the dial; his peers persuaded him. From today, Ateliers Associés takes on everything around the watch, while Mickaël finishes the twenty pieces by hand in Les Brenets, above the Doubs, for delivery early next year.