Understanding where value is created.

Several years working in B2B textile gave me a precise understanding of how a garment is actually made, who the real actors are, and how major ready-to-wear brands organise their upstream operations. I knew where margin was built, and where it was captured : by the brands that spoke directly to the end customer.

Around 2014, I started paying close attention to US and UK fashion brands and what made their e-commerce platforms fundamentally different from what existed in France at the time. The answer was intent. Brands like Anthropologie had understood something the French market hadn't caught up with yet : the store, physical or digital, should be a destination, not a catalogue. Glen Senk, who scaled Anthropologie from $800K to $1B, said it clearly : the goal was to make the customer love the brand. If they love it, they pay for it.

That became the founding logic of Condate Online. I built every capability needed to compete on image : creative direction, photo shoots, model recruitment, web merchandising, editorial content. The platform ran on Prestashop and became the most formative experience of my career. It forced me to understand e-commerce end-to-end, from product to customer, from cost to conversion.

Creativity drove every decision on the platform.

Each new collection came with a full visual refresh : new category images, new editorial content, new shoot. Studio and outdoor photography, model casting, lighting, post-production, all done in-house.

Casting and lighting mattered. The right model in the right setting sells the product better than any product description. We saw it every season.

Changing the visuals regularly kept the site worth visiting between purchases. People came back regularly to see what was new. Web merchandising was the main tool to make that happen, turning product pages into something you actually wanted to browse.

Paid social, organic and influencer. One integrated strategy.

Meta campaigns ran on an annual budget of €4 to 5K. The goal was to understand who responded to the product, which visuals worked and which audiences converted. Some campaigns returned €200 in sales on a €30 spend. Others broke even. All paid traffic was directed to product pages or dedicated landing pages, never to the homepage. Every source was tracked in GA4.

Growing the Instagram community through paid campaigns proved harder. Traffic campaigns converted on the site but rarely turned into followers. The account reached 8K to 9K followers over the full period, built mostly through organic content and the influencer program.

The influencer channel was where the real learning happened. We started with large accounts above 75K followers. Website traffic increased on launch days but the effect disappeared within 48 hours. The audience was too broad, age ranges too wide, style profiles too scattered to build any retention. Repeat purchases were almost nonexistent.

We shifted to micro-influencers in the 5K to 30K range, fashion-focused, with a younger and more consistent audience. Conversion on promo codes was higher across every campaign. Customers came back within 30 days. After several campaigns we built a scoring model based on two variables : engagement rate relative to follower count, and audience alignment on age, style and niche. Profiles that scored well on both consistently outperformed larger accounts on every metric that mattered.