2022 in review
I haven’t posted here (or anywhere else) in a while, but that’s not (only) out of laziness. To be honest, the last couple of weeks of 2022 were pretty intense, and that’s not me blowing smoke up my ass. In a nutshell:
The good stuff
my consulting firm has been working full steam, with several small but cool personal branding projects, all the while taking a lot of time on my biggest current gig — a stint in Capgemini’s global sustainability marketing team. In November and December, we launched — in no particular order — the company’s first transversal report on sustainability in organizations, a digital executive digest edition, had two live launch events (one internal, one external, both taking about as much time to setup), hosted a couple of roundtables on sustainability and innovation in Europe and the States… and that’s just what I was directly involved with. The team also published the company’s first paper on biodiversity, a bunch of success stories, expert testimonials, sectoral and topical reports… Basically, this past week being off felt good. Except for the fact that my daughter generously shared her stomach bug halfway through; and that a couple of colleagues actually worked this week…
my business with rising superstar artist Jordane Saget is not merely taking off, it’s skyrocketing. Our number of active projects is too high to even list here, but below are a few highlights:
setting up a cool takeover of Stella McCartney’s Paris shop during fashion week (which got Jordane a record breaking number of views on TikTok, not all of which came from me, try as I might);
launching our first ever NFT project by drawing over Paris’ entire Pont Saint-Louis (right behind Notre-Dame cathedral). The project itself is not even out yet, so watch out!
inaugurating Jordane’s first foray into sacred art with the recreation of stained glass for an entire medieval church North of Paris — the church is now a cultural center, but it gave way to subsequent ideas with a clothing line and more… the guy never stops!
taking part in all sort of charity auctions with fellow star artists, designers and painters while we prepare the launch of our very own foundation… I’ll stop here.
The formative stuff
End of 2022 was also the moment my partners and I decided to stop development of our music startup Sondz. It had been my pet project for many years (almost a decade, to be precise), but the more experienced among us will tell you — you have to know when to call it quits. To be absolutely fair, we could have reached this conclusion sooner, but we wanted to explore many different ideas to be certain there was no decisive way out for the company.
The underlying idea — a global information directory for music — was cool, but a little too broad, perhaps not enticing enough as such, and a little passé with good reason: had we started the business in 2020 (the year we actually launched our first public version), the site would have looked different… I don’t know yet whether I’ll launch another music-related business project, but I keep playing music and working with musicians in my spare time, so there is that.
The future stuff
I kind of told myself a while back that I couldn’t have more than 3 active projects. For a while, I had consulting and Sondz. Then the business with Jordane popped out semi-expectedly — and exploded way quicker than I’d ever dreamed of — so my plate got kind of full. I forgot to mention I also started teaching in a new grad school, but consider it a hobby…
Now that Sondz is off the slate of active projects, I technically have a third spot available. And, believe me, I’m working on filling it… Here’s to 2023!