The retail visionary who broke America with AI imagery
LOCATION: Paris, France
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: French and English
CURRENT ROLE: CEO, Nfinite
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES:
Lawyer, Gondran de Robert Avocats
Associate, Darrois Villey Maillot Brochier
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Nextwaver and Mentor
Nfinite is a SaaS-based visual e-commerce platform that provides brands and retailers with tools for creating imagery – and the brainchild of CEO Alexandre de Vigan. Since launching in 2017, Nfinite has increased its revenue tenfold and secured $100 million in Series B funding. Today, it has 200 employees and more than 100 customers – including three of the top five global retailers.
Despite the firm’s apparent success, De Vigan still has big ambitions for the future. “We believe that we can transform the way that people shop, and reinvent the process through visual experience,” he says. E-commerce is forecast to grow by 50%, with sales of $7.4 trillion, over the next four years – so the future looks rosy for this e-commerce disruptor. But it’s a long way from where De Vigan began his career, as a lawyer advising companies on how to avoid the pitfalls of debt. He chose law as his profession, partly because he had watched his own father fall into debt. He describes his father as “an entrepreneur with some successes and some failures” – and one of those failures left him dependent on lawyers.
“I was around seven years old, and I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t want what happened to my father to happen to others.” He studied business in Italy, followed by law in New York, but he quickly discovered that he would rather be on the other side of the fence. “I was tired of not having enough impact and just giving advice to others.”
Designing the future
De Vigan’s entrepreneurial light-bulb moment came, as it does for many, from personal experience. He was in the process of buying an apartment and he noticed the important role of visuals when choosing which houses to view and which to avoid. “I realised that the most important thing was the imagery but often your tastes don’t relate to other people’s. So, I thought, what if we use technology to redecorate houses?” Better imagery, he reasoned, would create more traffic to the site.
De Vigan’s company began to provide better online visual experiences using computer-generated imagery but, aftera year, he became frustrated that the company was not growing fast enough. He decided to pivot to the more general e-commerce market. “I thought, instead of solving a visual pain for real estate, why not solve it for the whole of retail? And boom, numbers grew,” he says.
One of Nfinite’s customers was Ikea, the Swedish flatpack furniture giant, which led to another pivot. De Vigan’s company became more involved in how visuals were displayed onthe web, and it also started offering tools that would allow people to move images and providea 360-degree view of an item. It alsogave retailers the opportunity to puttheir images in context: for instance,an image of a coffee table was not justa standalone item – it was displayedwithin a computer-generated living room.
But then Covid-19 hit. “We had no buyers anymore, so we had to think. What if we used this dynamic technology for another purpose, like enabling anyone to create
a visual?” That pivot also hit a ceiling “because creatives were not using it in the way we hoped, so we thought, how about moving to an automated platform?”
The transatlantic road to success
This constant need for reinvention means it has been a “windy path” for Nfinite. At one point, De Vigan found himself looking at bankruptcy. He hoped that a mentor at the time would “write me a cheque”. Instead, he received advice that he considers the most important of his life. “He said to me ‘Alex, you know no one forced you to do what you’re doing. So don’t complain and don’t quit’.”
“I think the only reason we have been successful, and might be successful in the future, is because we have a tonne of scars,” De Vigan says. “You start with something, and you learn from it. The biggest learning is to know what you succeeded and failed at. That’s the thread that has been driving my entrepreneur journey.”
And it’s the Nfinite ride that led De Vigan to America and the ultimate retail prize of signing Walmart, a $500 billion firm.He feels that the US has a “magic talent” when it comes to product marketing. “They are adopting technology earlier than in Europe, so you can test it faster and bigger. That was what I was excited about when I decided to try.”
But again, it was a long road. “Before signing Walmart, it took three years of them saying they were not interested, of not taking a meeting, saying ‘You’re not scalable’. And then we sent them something that piqued an interest.”
Since then, Nfinite has added behemoth Amazon and home improvement giant Lowes to its roster of high-status clients. “We signed those companies not because we were better but because we didn’t take no for an answer,” he says.
Being persistent though is not enough. “It’s very, very expensive to be in the US. You need to be very thoughtful about that. You need to invest time and money – and have a strategy,”
De Vigan says. “And the first thing you need is a customer. You are not going to raise funds in the US if you don’t have a US customer.”
Firms also need to consider who is on the payroll, he adds.“If you want to succeed in America then you have to have Americans on the ground. If it is sales you are interested in, you need to have American salespeople who know how to talk to American buyers.”
Those considering the move across the pond need to think about geography and culture too. “Something that is very important to understand is that it is not one country. It’s 50 states. Doing business in Arkansas is not the same as doing business in California. It’s a totally different culture.”
Better together
It’s tips like these that De Vigan hopes to share with the Boardwave community – and he hopes he can learn from others too. “I’m a solo founder and entrepreneurship is very lonely. You need to have people who can relate to what you’re doing, with advice from people who are running into the same types of issues,” he says. “Being part of a network of entrepreneurs with the purpose of helping each other, and sharing, that’s what I am excited about.”
De Vigan thinks back to the beginning of his business journey. “I would have loved to have that from older entrepreneurs.” And he’s determined to share everything that he’s learned along the way with business-owners who are at the start
of their ventures now.
But does he still regard himself as an entrepreneur despite the huge success of Nfinite? “One of the keys to success in being an entrepreneur is humility. Yes, we have had a lot of success but we’re still at the beginning of the journey. There are so many things to improve, to change, to learn from and to grow. I used to think when I fundraise it’s going to be OK, and then when I do series A it’s going to be OK. And then when we get Walmart and Series B. But every step, you want to go higher.”
There’s a key lesson that De Vigan has learned along the way. “As a CEO, we can do too many things and we get dispersed. One of the hardest things is to shift from doing everything to being able to trust and delegate, and enable people below you.”
De Vigan admits that having a family has forced him to slow down. “Before I had three kids, I was working all the time. I was coming home and opening my computer. Now,if I come home before they’re asleep, even if I wanted to work, I can’t.” Although he adds that he remains laser-focused on growing his business. “Now that my companyhas customers in the US, my working day ends after 11pm. Of course, I would like to have dinner or go running or dive into boxing but it’s about the focus of our priorities. Right now, the priority is that the business is successful – and I’m going to do whatever it takes.”
He adds: “If you want to have a work-life balance, don’t bean entrepreneur.” In fact, he compares owning a businessto being a competitive athlete. “It’s a marathon and it’s going to last for years. And if you want to succeed, you need to have a clear head and a clear way of thinking. You need to be able to handle a tonne of pressure and therefore you need to have balance like an athlete.”
De Vigan currently lives in an apartment in Paris but, one day, he says he would like to design his own home by the sea. It feels like a fitting next stage on this long entrepreneurial journey. And one thing is guaranteed: the visuals will be stunning.
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Don’t quit.
2. Everything is a matter of focus and timing: don’t launch marketing until you have proof of concept, and don’t hire before you have some traction.
3. Be super-organised. The most valuable currency you have is time.
If you hadn’t become an entrepreneur, what career would you have pursued?
I like to design homes so I would have become an architect.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
My laptop.
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