Leaf, a fashion tech start-up

A start-up co-founded by Thibault and David and that was accelerated by the HEC incubator at Station F.

We explored a lot of different ideas and pivoted quite a lot over the course of 18 months (100% bootstrapped).

Our last pivot was to build the first online platform to help people prepare their shopping sessions. Imagine Zalando, but instead of buying the articles you put in your basket, we'd put them aside for you in the stores located in the area you selected.

Once you'd place the reservation, we'd actually receive an email and call all the stores for you (behind the scenes, aka. wiz of oz MVP), to make sure the stock was available in the selected store.

We added products from 50+ premium brands available on the platform, and had built an algorithm to classify unstructured data, that would add tags to help us understand what our user would search for on the app. We also added sustainability tags, which we would use to sligthly put forward the eco-friendly articles in the results.

The app included:

• A main search tab, on which you'd be able to use the search bar to geolocate all corresponding articles.
• A wishlist tab in which you'd be able to find back all the articles you previously liked.
• A map tab to find all the stores that are available on the platform around you.
• A settings table to help you setup profile information or new products alerts.

After 18 months of work, including 4 months of lockdown with all stores closed, and after 4 major pivots, we decided to stop the project, as we wanted to move to our next chapter. Unfortunately, we never managed to get a brand pay for our services, and all the VCs we spoke with did not find our numbers good enough.

The next time I build a start-up, I'll build a product I can sell and not play the "start-up game" of raising money.