The French entrepreneur Gaël Bonnel Sanchez has held many titles in his lifetime: football player, movie producer, business founder, and CEO, among others. While some know him best as the producer behind Fractures or the founder of GBS Models, his more recent projects have proven him to be a visionary focused on innovation, unrestrained by the boundaries of sectors and industries.

Black G and Almas Vodka

Gaël is credited with being the creator of the first caviar-flavored vodka in the world, later inspiring the likes of Pernod Ricard and Petrossian to produce their own caviar-based lines.

As the story goes, Gaël was first stirred to create his own take on the age-old spirit while shooting a movie in the historic city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Inspired by the abundance and quality of local wheat, he began searching for a new way to produce vodka. For centuries, the ceremony of caviar tasting has been accompanied with vodka, so ultimately, he decided to marry them and - Black G Caviar Vodka was born.

Seeking to refine the product even further, Gaël later introduced Almas Vodka – using the incredibly rare golden variety of caviar obtained from the albino sturgeon (Almas caviar). Encased in an impressive crystal, bronze, and gold amphora handmade in Paris by Benito Cristallerie, Almas Vodka is the definition of luxury, with only a handful of bottles produced per year.

Heroïca Tempus signature timepieces

The Heroïca Tempus line of watches is another of Gaël’s innovative reinventions, featuring authentic signatures from historical figures on the dial. Created in partnership with the Swiss watch manufacturer Christophe Golay (Golay Spierer), each watch is handmade and entirely unique.

So far, the Heroïca Tempus line includes watches inspired by the figures of Napoléon Bonaparte and Albert Einstein, featuring a gold coin dating back to 1807 and a hand-engraved meteorite piece, respectively. Thanks to a partnership with Sotheby’s, these unique timepieces are set to make their way across continents to enter U.S. markets.

MyMoth bracelets

With so much variety in the jewelry sector, is there still room for a creative, innovative, entirely new product to enter the market?

As it turns out, the answer is yes – as proven by Gaël’s recent MyMoth project. Going beyond the bounds of what may seem possible, Gaël has developed a line of bracelets featuring genuine mammoth weaved wool, adorned with a carved piece of mammoth ivory. The materials are carbon-dated to 45 000 B.C. to prove their authenticity, and 18K rose gold completes each piece.

Available worldwide in four varieties, the bracelets – due to the immense rarity of the materials used to create them – are a highly exclusive product, with twenty five pieces only produced per year.

Interstellar Humanity

What if a part of you could travel beyond the Solar System and explore the outer space for eternity? What if human life could be encapsulated indefinitely and given the opportunity to reach unknown areas of the Universe?

Inspired by these and other questions, Gaël founded Interstellar Humanity - his now-flagship project. Based in Geneva and developed in partnership with world-renowned scientists and engineers. In 2019, the enterprise is Gaël’s attempt at revolutionizing and innovating space exploration.

While most current outer space exploration projects are focused on identifying and studying exoplanets or getting involved with planet hopping – that is, planets located outside the Solar System and respectively planet colonization – Gaël’s approach is, unsurprisingly, different.

Interstellar Humanity is working under the assumption that there may be intelligent life in the outer space, and it may be more technologically advanced than humanity. “We should not think like a 2021 human with our current perception of technology,” Gaël says. “On the contrary: we should push our brains and our egos to their limits, to accept the fact that just a hundred years ago we were not even able to analyze DNA. Imagine what another civilization, millions of years more advanced than us, could create with our DNA. Also, it is a good way to study life’s origins”.

As a consequence of this assumption, the project’s aim is to send samples of human DNA beyond the Solar System, to sail across outer space until it’s found by another civilization – “like a message in a bottle”, as Gaël puts it.

The pinnacle of this ambitious project will be the launch of a space exploration mission, planned for 2025. In the meantime, anyone can apply to become an Interstellar Humanity space traveler.

Even as preparations are being made for the big launch of Interstellar Humanity, Gaël continues working on his other projects and exploring new ideas for innovating life as we know it. We tend to think of innovation and reinvention as scripted into the frame of a specific field or industry: yet Gaël’s story proves that when a strong entrepreneurial streak and an exceptional individual vision are freed from the bounds of separate industries, even the sky is not the limit.