Fashion has a useful way of confusing the spectator. The clothes are visible. The work that gets them seen is harder to spot. Someone has to send the sample, invite the editor, follow the coverage and decide whether the whole exercise deserved its budget. Michael Jaïs built his career around that less photogenic side of persuasion. A front row can be glamorous. Its administrative arrangements rarely are.
His route into it began outside fashion. Born in Cannes, Jaïs studied economics and finance at Sciences Po Paris, then worked at Accenture and Thomson Multimedia. He subsequently founded Leonard’s Logic, a software business sold to Hummingbird in 1999. That sequence matters: the future Launchmetrics chief arrived with experience of companies, software and transactions, rather than a designer’s collection waiting to be discovered.
The opening he identified was an overlooked department. Communications teams were dealing with digital media and emerging social networks while lacking the software other business functions already used. In 2002, he co-founded Augure to give them tools for reputation, influence and digital marketing. The founding motive was practical. There was work to do, and the people doing it needed better equipment.
That starting point still explains much of Jaïs’s later career. He approached attention as something an organization had to manage. Publicity created tasks, relationships and decisions. A business could be surrounded by conversation and still struggle to understand which part of it mattered. Augure gave him a place to work on that problem before the fashion industry became his principal stage.
A theory of influence, before the merger
By 2014, Jaïs was describing influence through three criteria: exposure, propagation and focus. Exposure joined audience size with frequency of communication. Propagation concerned the ability to get a message repeated. Focus meant a person’s share of discussion around a particular subject. The distinction was consequential. Being widely known and being persuasive about a specific thing were different advantages.
He also separated professional media voices, celebrities and consumers who had built communities around shared interests. Read today, that classification feels familiar. At the time, it supplied communications teams with a way to think about people who did not fit neatly into a traditional press list. A specialist could matter without becoming a household name. A large audience could still be the wrong audience.
In his writing, Jaïs described influence as the ability to move opinions and provoke reactions within a targeted community. He also worked alongside Augure Lab, INRIA and CNRS in research on social-network behavior. The interest was already broader than counting mentions. It concerned how a message traveled between people, and how a company might make sense of the journey.
Paris meets the guest list
The next useful combination arrived through Fashion GPS, the business founded by Eddie Mullon. Its tools handled the practical machinery of fashion: samples, events and the connections around them. Augure brought media and influencer intelligence. Publicly launched under the Launchmetrics name in 2016, the combination put Jaïs in the chief executive’s chair and Mullon in the presidency.
The fit was easy to explain on paper. The same brand that needed help organizing a launch also needed to understand the attention it produced. Bringing those functions together connected decisions made before an event with evidence collected afterward. Sample management and influence analysis might sound like unlikely dinner companions. Inside a communications department, they had plenty to discuss.
The merger announcement set out a broad working system: identify relevant people, produce events, create virtual showrooms, track samples and measure the resulting exposure. It also placed the business inside an existing fashion network, with relationships involving the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the British Fashion Council and IMG. Jaïs’s software ambitions now had an unusually specific setting.
The geographical pairing mattered, too. Augure came from Paris; Fashion GPS came from New York. Launchmetrics combined organizations as well as product capabilities. Jaïs had to run a company whose activities crossed offices, markets and professional customs. The name on the door changed quickly. Making the components work together was a longer assignment.
Putting a number beside the noise
In September 2018, Launchmetrics announced $50 million in financing led by Bpifrance, with Seventure, Cipio Partners and Famille C also participating. The funding supported a plan combining product development and acquisitions. The company’s ambitions were becoming expensive in the ordinary entrepreneurial sense: more software, more specialist knowledge and more territory to cover.
The measurement proposition became particularly clear with the July 2019 release of Insights. Launchmetrics used its proprietary Media Impact Value, or MIV, to assign monetary values to marketing and public-relations activity. It offered executives comparisons across voices, channels, periods and competitors. A scattered collection of articles and social posts could be put into a common analytical frame.
Those dollar figures need careful reading. MIV is a modeled measure of media impact; a dollar of MIV does not establish a dollar of product sales. Its usefulness lies in making unlike activities comparable within the company’s methodology. A fashion executive looking at coverage across markets needs a consistent yardstick before deciding where to investigate or spend next.
Acquisitions filled in adjacent pieces. IMAXtree joined in December 2019, adding visual content creation and distribution. PARKLU followed in 2020, expanding the company’s reach into Chinese influencer analytics. In March 2022, Launchmetrics acquired DMR, a longtime competitor with two decades of historical data. Each transaction extended the material available for understanding a brand’s public presence.
The show leaves the room
One revealing chapter was Launchmetrics’ work with the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode on digital Paris Fashion Week. Jaïs discussed the shift with the federation’s executive president, Pascal Morand. Their conversations placed the business beside a creative question: what could a fashion presentation become when its audience encountered it through a screen?
In 2020, Jaïs pointed to the possibility of a more intimate emotional connection and new ways for brands to express themselves. Dior’s film presentation offered a concrete example of storytelling beyond the conventional runway format. The technology company was involved in distribution and measurement, but the attraction for the audience still depended on something worth watching.
By June 2021, the federation’s review recorded more than $427 million in cumulative MIV, 50,000 press posts and 173 million cumulative views across broadcast platforms. Those were different measures of the same broader experiment, rather than interchangeable claims about revenue. Together they described the scale of a fashion event whose public life extended well beyond a room of invited guests.
For Jaïs, that development connected the operational and analytical halves of Launchmetrics. The company could help fashion reach an audience, then examine the response. The creative work remained the reason anyone cared. Measurement supplied another set of questions about where it traveled, who amplified it and what the brand might learn before the next collection.
Year reviewed in June 2021. Media impact, coverage and views are distinct measures.
A larger company, a wider remit
Lectra announced its agreement to acquire a majority of Launchmetrics in January 2024. The initial deal covered 50.3 percent of the capital and voting rights, for an amount estimated at approximately $85 million at announcement. Further purchases were scheduled through 2030. The transaction gave Jaïs’s business a place within a group already supplying technology across fashion’s production processes.
The financial snapshot was more useful than any victory adjective. Lectra expected Launchmetrics’ 2023 revenue to be about $45 million, including more than $40 million in recurring revenue, from close to 1,700 customers in around 20 countries. These were expectations published with the deal. They show the scale of the operation being acquired without turning an announcement into a final audited result.
Jaïs framed the alliance around international development, artificial intelligence and the combination of product and marketing data. Lectra could follow more of the chain from development and production to the way collections were marketed. He joined Lectra’s executive committee on January 29, 2024, while continuing as Launchmetrics’ co-founder and chief executive.
“Launchmetrics wanted to join forces with the Lectra Group in order to accelerate the development of its offering on a global scale.”Michael Jaïs · January 2024
Attention is only the first question
There is a parallel career in the classroom. Jaïs teaches marketing at Sciences Po, the institution where he studied, and serves as programme co-director for the MSc Affluencers and Luxury Business at Université Côte d’Azur. Teaching sits naturally beside a business that asks practitioners to interpret unfamiliar forms of evidence. A dashboard still needs someone capable of asking it a useful question.
His account of luxury also leaves room for feeling. In 2023, he spoke of emotional intelligence alongside data intelligence, and of luxury houses becoming producers of cultural experiences. For someone whose company puts monetary values on visibility, that is a revealing emphasis. An experience has to mean something to its audience before an analyst can sensibly discuss its impact.
In June 2026, Jaïs described clients asking for recommendations beyond reporting and rankings. He also argued that expert coverage would become more valuable as consumers used AI assistants to discover brands. That remains his strategic reading of a changing market. It gives the next phase of Launchmetrics a clear problem to solve: helping a client choose its next action.
The personal details are less solemn. In an early company interview, Jaïs picked New York for business, Paris for culture and Cannes for fun. Offered a choice between hamburgers and pizza, he nominated linguine with pesto. Even a questionnaire, apparently, benefits from a third option. After years spent helping brands assess their choices, he seems comfortable making one of his own.