Built in the field.
I've spent my career learning to read people, before reading markets.
I work independently, advising premium B2C and lifestyle brands through my company First Quarter. I am a partner of the Synapsio network, which allows me to bring in broader expertise when a project calls for it.
I also work with students at the Institut Français de la Mode – ranked among the top three fashion institutes in the world – helping them build and articulate their professional direction. It's a different context, but the underlying work is the same: helping people find the thread that connects who they are to where they're going.
Background
It started with image – photo production and art buying, working alongside houses like Van Cleef & Arpels, Le Printemps, and Asics. That early work taught me something that no brief can fully capture: the difference between a brand that understands its world and one that's performing for it. You see it in the details. You learn to feel it before you can name it and learn, early, that emotion is what makes any of it matter.
From there, I joined an innovative project within Chanel Métiers d’art – a formative experience in what it means to build meaning around craft, identity, and an audience that holds a brand to an almost impossible standard.
Then came ten years at L'Oréal Group, across some of the most distinct brand territories in the industry among them Lancôme, L'Oréal Paris, L'Oréal Professionnel, the L'Oréal Foundation. Each one a different community, a different set of codes, a different relationship between the brand and the people it was trying to reach. At the scale of a single brand and across entire divisions. From the French market to multi-country deployments spanning up to 130 markets.
What those years built – more than any methodology – was an instinct for the gap between what a brand believes about its audience and what that audience actually feels. I've seen that gap cost campaigns, misalign launches, and quietly erode brand relevance over time. I've also seen what happens when you close it early.
Selected engagements
All engagements are anonymised at the request of the brands involved.
-
An international beauty brand — a pioneer at its founding — had lost definition in a saturated market. Through community reading and strategic trade-offs, we identified the territory where the brand had genuine legitimacy, and rebuilt from there. Result: stronger KOL alignment, improved press rankings, increased D2C traffic, and a product offer that finally read clearly to the right audiences.
-
A high-profile personality was launching their own product line with scattered communications and no clear strategic anchor. Starting from community mapping, we built the brand platform and launch strategy from the ground up. Result: precise positioning, defined roles across the ecosystem, priority targets identified before a single piece of content was produced.
-
A premium equipment brand was tracking cultural trends without being able to convert them into actionable targets. We decoded the relevant codes, ran an alignment session across board and teams, and built a shared vocabulary. Result: community-specific messages, a coherent test campaign, and early signs of meaningful conquest.