Focus on Claire Bretton: Godmother of Alegria.academy's first class

Claire Bretton is the creator of an innovative eCommerce solution and is passionate about entrepreneurship and Nocode. She has been chosen to sponsor the first class of students at theAlegria Academy. Here's a look back at her dazzling career.

Strategy x Retail x Tech: her key to success

Less than five years after graduating from business school, Claire Bretton launched her first tech startup . The trigger? A real taste for entrepreneurship and the identification of a crucial need for e-commerce players: competitive intelligence.

In no time at all, she surrounded herself with two engineers she had met in the strategy consulting firm where she worked to launch this innovative project. Having acquired expertise in the retail and ready-to-wear sectors during their experience as consultants , the three of them realised that it was crucial tooptimise the competitive benchmarking process in order to maintain their market share and be responsive to rapidly changing consumer trends.

Their startup Daco was born in 2016. The trio launched and combined their strengths. Anis Gandoura, a polytechnic engineer, focuses on the technical development of the solution, while Paul Mouginot, a data expert and fashion addict, brings his business knowledge to bear. Claire is in charge of commercial and product development.

The founders quickly decided to combine the power ofartificial intelligence, web scraping and data visualisation to develop a solution that captures thousands of images of clothing on the web. Users of the solution can thus obtain a 360-degree view of what is being sold on competing e-commerce platforms.

Less than a year after the launch of Daco, Claire moved into the marketing phase by meeting with market players. Having already a technologically stable product with a solid database and tests, she wasted no time in winning over the big names in retail.

In July 2018, it was a French e-commerce behemoth that fell under the spell of Daco. At the end of an incubation programme launched by Station F in partnership with Veepee, formerly Vente-Privée, the three partners received a takeover proposal from the group, which they accepted.

Wisdom from a Nocode Godmother: Code or Nocode?

Claire owes this entrepreneurial success in part to theintegration of Nocode into their design tools. 

Indeed, in parallel to the cutting-edge technology at the heart of the Daco solution, other, more visual elements must be created to finalise the product. Customers need to visualise the results in a well-organised way in customised dashboards. 

The design of these user interfaces would involve engineers for several weeks. As Claire knows, customers cannot wait for such long development times, they need to see the data now and in real time!

She then realised that she would not be able to design her finished product in code, as it was too time-consuming and ambitious for the market's needs. 

In order to be able to present the user interface of the solution to its customers quickly, it is imperative to create these customised dashboards more quickly.

She then got to know Nocode and in a few days trained on a tool that allows her to create them very quickly. Nocode allows her to design the dashboards herself in a few hours. As a real agility booster, Nocode proved to be a considerable time saver and allowed them to concentrate their efforts on the real value of their product: artificial intelligence.

A few years later, during the first lockdown in 2020, Claire and her husband launched an association project to help traders. Saving our businesses Save Our Shops is an initiative to sell vouchers online to support closed shops. The aim is for traders to be paid in times of crisis on the products they sell when their shops reopen. Supported by Claire and a dozen volunteer developers, the platform was born.

Nevertheless, with hindsight Claire thinks that she could have launched this project without the need to call on volunteer engineers, thanks to the use of Nocode. This is why she is now keen to make Nocode known and to democratise it.

As the Godmother of the first class oftheAlegria AcademyAs the patron of the first class of the Alegria Academy, her message to the students is clear: the creation of digital solutions is within everyone's reach. There is no need to put up barriers as she did with Daco, by wishing to develop everything in "classic" code, Nocode makes it possible to design everything and above all to launch it quickly.

A committed entrepreneur: from online fashion to second-hand trade...

As Claire explains in theExitroots podcast, her first company, Daco, was acquired by Veepee following their participation in the incubation programme. 

This was an unexpected turn of events, since their original intention was not to raise funds and to develop independently. All of their revenues were initially reinvested in the R&D of the solution.

And yet, little by little, they naturally became part of Veepee. At first, it was an opportunity for them to test their solution on an e-commerce giant, then they realised the potential of their product if the Veepee teams took part. Once the decision was made, it was no problem for them to integrate this large group while keeping their startup operation and agility, just like an intra-company.

The acquisition of Daco by Veepee has not only been an incredible accelerator for the evolution of the technology developed by the startup but also an opportunity for Claire Bretton to embark on a new challenge.

After becoming aware of the importance of being able to democratise the creation of digital solutions, Claire, the daughter of a farmer, is now embarking on a project that is more committed. She wants to make fashion more responsible and encourage more ethical fashion consumption. Alongside Veepee, she is committed to developing the second-hand clothing market through a "Re-Cycle" project. The aim? To collect clothes and shoes, regardless of their condition, process them in a warehouse and recycle the importable parts.

The very first students of the Academy are under a lucky star. Their sponsor has learned crucial lessons about the challenges of technical skills: what should be delegated to professional developers? What is the key value of a solution and what should I know how to do myself to go fast? Her strategic vision, entrepreneurial experience and committed ideas will inspire these lucky future Makers!