Data Practitioner & Educator
Data from experience, not from theory.
15 Years in Luxury & Fashion · From Business Need to Governed Delivery
I've spent 15 years building data systems inside some of the most demanding environments in the world: luxury, watchmaking, fashion. Now I want to share what that actually looks like from the inside.
Get in touch →About
I didn't come from academia. I came from the floor. Building dashboards that nobody used, fixing pipelines that broke on Monday morning, and slowly figuring out what it actually takes to make data work inside a real organisation.
Fifteen years across Paris, Seoul, and Geneva. Through Céline, The Kooples, L'Oréal, Cartier, and now Vacheron Constantin. I've seen data projects succeed and fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology.
I'm not looking to become a full-time academic. I want to bring the real thing into the classroom: the decisions, the trade-offs, the moments where everything you read in a textbook suddenly doesn't apply.
Expertise
Not a tutorial on dbt syntax. A conversation about how you choose, justify, and live with a modern stack: from the first executive question to year three of maintenance.
How do you make people in finance, commercial, or supply chain genuinely care about data quality? What works, what doesn't, and why most data culture initiatives quietly die after the launch event.
An industry that doesn't publish its playbook. Sell-through rates, client data sensitivity, omnichannel where the sales associate still matters most. The specifics no case study captures.
The difference between governance that lives in a PDF and governance that actually changes how decisions get made. Domain ownership, data contracts, and the politics in between.
I helped build one at Cartier Korea, then applied the principles at Vacheron Constantin. Not the theory: what distributed ownership actually costs, and when it's worth it.
Journey
Leading data product delivery across finance, commercial, supply chain, and manufacturing. From business need to governed delivery. Driving a Tech & Data Culture programme across the entire organisation.
Created a Data & Digital department from scratch to bring HQ data strategy to life locally. Implemented a data mesh, led a team of analytics engineers, and served 300+ end-users across office and boutique staff.
Built and shaped the Cartier Data Office analytics platform: enabling the data vision, driving adoption, and supporting end users at scale.
Delivered the L'Oréal Retail Analytics platform on GCP using Agile methodology. 32 retail brands, 33 countries, 30K users worldwide. Coordinated between central HQ and local teams across data and digital projects.
Managed the Retail BI platform for L'Oréal worldwide. First exposure to data at global scale, across brands and geographies.
Defined a 3-year data roadmap, implemented governance best practices, and led the data component of the house's digital transformation.
Managed BI projects worldwide from conception to delivery. Business workshops, contractor management, BI budget, and the go-to person for all intelligence requests across the house.
The technical foundation: ETL development, reporting, functional specs, and the first lessons in making data useful for people who don't care about the pipeline.
"Seeing someone go from zero to owning their data. That's the reason."
Teaching
I love my work. Always have. But one of the best parts of 15 years in data isn't the architecture or the pipelines. It's watching someone who never thought of themselves as "technical" realise they can read a data model, question an assumption, or challenge a number in a meeting.
I want to bring the industry into the room. Not in a way that reveals anything confidential, but in a way that makes students understand what data work actually looks like when the company has 150 years of history, global operations, and a board that still runs on intuition.
The luxury and fashion sector is almost invisible in data education. Someone should fix that.
Contact
I'm open to guest lectures, semester modules, or a simple conversation about where my experience might fit. No formal process needed. An email works fine.
jc@datatelier.ch