Laurène Altmayer and the business of taking your time

Christmas is an awkward deadline for a prototype. It has very little interest in engineering, and children are notoriously unmoved by supply-chain explanations. For Laurène Altmayer, the early years of Tikino included 1,207 preorders and a Christmas delivery that slipped away. Families had said yes to a projector for their children. Turning that yes into a parcel proved rather more complicated.

Altmayer had come to the project from intellectual property law. With Aliénor Bouvier-Lewi and, later, Thiphaine Le Roy, she was entering the business of making a physical object. Their idea involved stories, illustrations and images projected into a room. Their work would also involve components, financing, production and the less enchanting business of telling people when their orders might arrive.

The contrast runs through her career since. Tikino offers an invitation to slow down and watch something together. Behind it sits a founder learning how to keep a company moving without allowing the next deadline to dictate every decision. By July 2026, her account of entrepreneurship had come to emphasise the long view and measured growth. There were practical reasons for that preference.

An exhibition, then an undertaking

The beginning was an art exhibition. Altmayer and Bouvier-Lewi found themselves talking about the power of images and the difficulty of occupying their children without reaching for familiar electronic devices. It is an appealing place for a hardware company to begin: among things made to be looked at, two future business partners considering how looking might become an activity in its own right.

They started the Tikino project in 2019. Le Roy subsequently joined them. The combination they pursued was specific: a projector for children, coupled with a digital library of entertaining and educational material. The object and its contents would belong to the same proposition. Making a projector was only part of the assignment. They also had to decide what deserved to be projected.

Altmayer’s professional starting point makes the change interesting. Intellectual property law concerns the ownership and use of creative work. Tikino deals in stories, authors, illustrators and the machinery that brings their work into a room. Those activities touch, but the move still took her into unfamiliar territory. A legal qualification supplies no exemption from a manufacturing problem.

Her public education record includes the Paris bar’s professional training school, EFB, in 2009 and 2010. The subsequent turn into entrepreneurship put a different kind of professional learning ahead of her. She was becoming responsible for something that had to leave a factory, survive delivery and work in a family’s home. The finished object would be the most persuasive explanation of the idea.

Christmas is a difficult deadline

Crowdfunding gave the project an audience before it gave that audience a product. There is a particular tension in that arrangement. An order expresses confidence in a proposed object. Until delivery, the founders are holding both the money and the responsibility for making that confidence reasonable. Early enthusiasm is useful. It also establishes a queue of people entitled to ask what happens next.

The missed Christmas shipment made that obligation concrete. By November 2022, Altmayer was publicly discussing the experience of managing expectations around those 1,207 preorders, alongside the financing and development work required to reach customers. The story had acquired the sort of detail that rarely appears in an initial pitch: people were waiting, and the promised occasion for giving the product had passed.

In 2022, she announced that the first Tikino projectors had been delivered, marking three years of work and persistence. Her thanks went to the early supporters and her two partners. The company’s accompanying account described shortages, rising prices and logistical difficulties, and acknowledged its manufacturing collaborators, Exceenis and Asteelflash. The announcement was a delivery notice with rather more history behind it than usual.

The sequence matters because it gives patience a measurable setting. Three years is a considerable interval between discussing a product and celebrating its arrival. Altmayer’s public response was to recognise the collective effort. Even a device small enough to sit on a bookshelf had required a network of people to bring it into being. Hardware has a way of making teamwork visible.

A millimetre gets a vote

Then came television. Tikino appeared in the third season of Qui veut être mon associé? in February 2023. In her account of preparing for the programme, Altmayer described selection rounds, rehearsals and tests, followed by the cameras, lights and five investors’ chairs. She recalled entering the set with her partners, nervous and determined. Here, at least, the drama had proper lighting.

The invitation itself had prompted an understandable mixture of delight and apprehension. Being chosen was exciting; appearing on television was another matter. That detail puts a human scale on the founder’s public role. A person can believe in a product, want it to reach more families and still need a moment to absorb the prospect of presenting it in front of cameras.

A later account of the journey includes a component problem measured in a single millimetre, affecting a production run of 2,000 pieces after the television appearance. The scale of the obstruction is almost comic. A millimetre is easy to overlook in a presentation. In a manufactured product, it can insist on everybody’s attention. Publicity and production keep different calendars.

By December 2025, her story included the work of explaining, repairing and continuing after such setbacks. These are revealing verbs for a chief executive. They describe obligations to people who already bought something. The next audience may be watching the pitch; existing customers are waiting for a working object. Both groups are part of the business, and the second is entitled to rather less theatre.

An audience is only the beginning

Altmayer has also taken a more unusual route to a public audience. For the #AMaPlace initiative, organised by SISTA and UN Women France, Benoît Torloting lent her his LinkedIn profile for a day. The March 2023 handover placed a woman building a young technology business in the online seat of the Bouygues Telecom chief executive. A profile, briefly, became a borrowed platform.

The initiative offers a useful glimpse of the connections around her work. Entrepreneurship involves finding people willing to make an introduction, provide support or lend some visibility. Altmayer and Bouvier-Lewi were also selected for the SISTA EntrepreneurEs programme with BNP Paribas. Those relationships belong in the story alongside manufacturing partners. A company needs routes into conversations as well as routes out of a factory.

In April 2025, Tikino’s reported commercial progress included more than €800,000 raised and €1 million in revenue, with no advertising expenditure. These were figures from that stage of the company’s development. They should be read with their date attached. The customer-acquisition approach she discussed relied on influence and word of mouth, rather than an advertising budget.

That choice still leaves plenty of work. Direct selling brings the product, price, delivery and after-sales experience into the same relationship with a family. Altmayer’s business discussions have covered customer service, logistics and working capital, as well as retail and international plans. The charming object in the photograph has a decidedly unromantic set of operating requirements. It would be surprising if it did not.

“Plus de lien, plus d’imaginaire, plus de calme.”

Laurène Altmayer, on her ambition for Tikino
More connection, more imagination, more calm.

The company she wants to keep

There is a social idea inside the product itself. Altmayer has described images that children can use to invent stories and activities that can be shared with other children or parents. The intended setting is a room people inhabit together. Authors and illustrators help supply the material; the family supplies the company. A wall becomes a place for looking and talking.

Her account also makes room for activities beyond the device. She has spoken of walks, games and stories among the resources available to parents. That breadth gives the venture a more everyday character. Tikino is an object a household might choose for a particular moment. The founder’s argument leaves room for other moments, other occupations and the perfectly respectable entertainment value of going outside.

The same attention to company appears in her professional life. Altmayer has publicly thanked Marina Narishkin for mentoring her through Women in Toys, describing the value of support and introductions within the toy, licensing and entertainment industries. She has also discussed maintaining trust between cofounders over years of work, including periods when a partner is far away. The partnership requires attention as the product changes.

In July 2026, she returned to the importance of endurance, controlled growth and building for the long term. Read against the earlier chapters, that preference has a clear history. A delayed parcel, an exacting component and a room full of cameras each demand a response. None supplies a complete timetable for the company that follows.

Altmayer’s career change began with a conversation about images. It became a sustained undertaking with two other women, industrial partners and families waiting at the other end. The projector is meant to make room for a story. Building the business has given her one of her own, with a useful appreciation for the time it takes to get to the next chapter.