Who I am
A bag, a watch, a bottle of scent: none of these carries any emotion of its own. Luxury has spent decades learning to attach one to them. It got very good at it, mostly by learning to read its Clients.
Wine starts from the opposite place. The emotion is already there, in the bottle, the place, the person who made it.
What's usually missing is the knowledge of Client behaviour and patterns, to deepen the engagement. I spent fifteen years doing that reading for luxury houses. I now do it where the attachment doesn't have to be manufactured.
Career
I started in sensory analysis at Dior, then spent five years at TNS Sofres learning what customer survey data can and can't tell you about people. Three years running insight for Hammerson's shopping centres in France and the UK taught me footfall and basket behaviour at scale.
At Richemont I spent two years on the B2B side across North Asia, where the maisons sold through resellers and barely saw the people who ended up wearing the watches. I built a way to collect end-Client data from those resellers, and then a way to analyse it, which is the same wall a domaine hits when its wine goes through importers and merchants.
Then five years at Chanel, leading the Client Insights and Intelligence team for the Fashion division in Hong Kong and Macau: one-to-one Clienteling for high-end Clients, including HNWIs, where the whole game is knowing each person well enough to be worth their time and deepen their engagement.
Same finding in both worlds: the analysis was rarely the hard part. Getting it into someone's hands in a form they'd act on, that was the hard part. I went independent to work on that end of it.
Credentials
Academics
- MSc in mathematics and applied statistics from the Université de Rennes
- Engineering degree in agri-food science from L'Institut Agro Rennes-Angers
Wine
- WSET Level 2 and Level 3, both passed with distinction
- French Wine Scholar with highest honours
My Experimental Vineyard
I planted 150 vines of Pinot Noir in Brittany (Saint Malo) in 2014. They give me around forty bottles a year, made naturally: about twelve degrees, fruit-driven, very little tannin, the sort of thing you open before dinner rather than with it. Forty bottles is not a business. It is, though, the difference between talking about harvest decisions and having made a few badly.
Personal
I'm a husband and the father of two boys. I've written a published book on Cambodian history, on the return of the Angkor temples to Cambodia in 1907.
Also, I was elected by the French community in Hong Kong in 2026 to represent them to the consulate (Conseiller des Français de l'Étranger). This mandate lasts until 2032.
You've got the data. One message and we'll see what's in it.
Let’s talkA first conversation, no strings. You'll leave knowing what your data can tell you.