As Launchmetrics celebrates its 10th anniversary, the accelerated pace of artificial intelligence has a strange way of warping the sense of the moment for founder and CEO Michael Jaïs.
On one hand, he noted that starting the company feels like "yesterday." On the other hand, he observed that the last two years alone have felt more like a century.
That distortion is a good place to start, because Launchmetrics spends its days turning fashion's seemingly unquantifiable impact of buzz, hype, and the wattage of a celebrity in the front row into numbers a brand can measure and track. This year, the company turns 10, and the anniversary lands at the exact moment its industry is asking whether any of the software it spent a decade building still matters.
Jaïs's answer: a lot of it may not. But for Launchmetrics, the data does.
The pitch nobody wanted
Launchmetrics was born in 2016 from the merger of Augure, the influencer-marketing company Jaïs founded in Paris in 2002, and Fashion GPS, a New York firm that had been wiring up the back end of Fashion Week since 2006. The new company was selling "brand performance," a radical idea that marketing buzz could be scored like a quarterly number. That turned out to be a tough sell.
