Vivien Garnes and the problem of 1,000 ties

A thousand neckties is an awkward quantity to keep in a living room. Enough to suggest a business. Enough, if nobody buys them, to suggest a mistake. Vivien Garnes had the ties and the website. What he needed was a reason for strangers to choose his little shop over everybody else’s.

He and Kevin Creusy had entered online retail with a product that seemed pleasantly uncomplicated. Neckties were easy to store and ship. Sizing would scarcely trouble them. Persuading customers proved rather more complicated. Fashion bloggers eventually helped shift the stock, giving the two merchants a lesson that would outlast the merchandise.

Today Garnes is co-founder and co-CEO of Upfluence, the creator marketing software company. He works from Lyon, while Creusy works from New York. Between the living-room inventory and that arrangement lie an agency detour, a software launch, a doctorate and years of trying to attach a meaningful number to a recommendation.

A merchant’s education

The necktie venture began in the early 2010s. Conventional online acquisition channels were difficult for a small entrant to afford. Sending products to bloggers, asking for reviews and pursuing replies offered another route to customers. It worked well enough to expose its own shortcomings.

Finding an appropriate blogger took time. So did finding a way to contact them, agreeing on a partnership and following up. Some collaborations generated sales; others disappointed. The merchants were learning two jobs at once: selling their product and organizing the people who might help them sell it.

There was a business hidden inside that second job. Other merchants would face the same search, negotiation and uncertainty. Software could help them make choices and handle the administration. Garnes and his collaborators began developing the project in 2012; the French Upfluence company was incorporated in 2013.

His account retains a useful sense of the ridiculous. The original product had apparently failed to persuade even its own proprietor to dress accordingly.

“I was not even wearing a tie on my own wedding day.”

Vivien Garnes, on his early ecommerce venture

Before the spreadsheets, the set list

Garnes had already practiced getting people to show up. He began classical guitar at six and later played in the metal band Aléa. The band toured in France and elsewhere in Europe. The band played roughly a hundred concerts, ranging from rooms holding 800 people to a bar with four drinkers.

That is a fairly rigorous lesson in audience variation. Garnes has described the organizational work as preparation for business: creating an association, securing bookings and handling logistics. Before there were campaigns to coordinate, there were gigs. An audience, however small, required somebody to arrange the evening.

By Upfluence’s early days he was also working in email marketing in Lyon. Building a company happened alongside paid employment and the tie venture. The origin was crowded with overlapping commitments. A musician’s experience of arranging the work around the performance had found another application.

The software took a detour

The initial software proposition did not immediately find buyers. Upfluence moved into executing campaigns for clients, giving the team a close view of the practical work its tools needed to support. Running the service supplied experience that developing the product alone had failed to provide.

The SaaS offering launched in 2016. This changed what customers could buy: a set of tools for carrying out their own creator marketing work. The company had learned through doing campaigns, then packaged parts of that work into software other teams could use themselves. That sequence gave the founders a chance to see where campaigns became difficult in practice. A tool for contacting people has to fit the way people answer, delay, negotiate and occasionally disappear. Running campaigns made those details part of the product discussion.

In September 2018, Upfluence announced a $3.6 million Series A backed by ISAI and French Partners. Garnes described plans to recruit on both sides of the Atlantic. The intended hires included developers, marketers and customer service staff. The money was attached to an expansion of the work, with Lyon and New York both in the picture.

The pitch of the period reflected a particular change among customers. Brands wanted to bring campaigns in-house. They would need tools to find creators, contact them and follow results. Upfluence’s opportunity grew alongside the decision to make creator partnerships a regular internal responsibility.

A question worth a doctorate

Garnes eventually took the question of returns into formal research. On September 28, 2021, he defended a Doctorate in Business Administration thesis titled Return on Influencer Marketing Investment, supervised by Professor Kiane Goudarzi. The thesis carries the names of Business Science Institute, SKEMA Business School and iaelyon.

The choice of subject brings the career into focus. His first merchant experiment had produced a concrete question about which partnerships justified their cost. Leading a company in the field gave that question a larger setting. Research offered another way to examine it, with the assumptions and measures laid out for scrutiny.

His academic interests also reached the creator’s side of the transaction. In 2024, Garnes co-authored Shorts on the Rise with Prajit T. Rajendran and Creusy. Their study examined 250 YouTube creators with substantial audiences, looking at long-form performance in relation to the arrival of short-form content.

The paper reported declining long-form views and engagement on the channels studied. Its scope matters: it examined a selected set of creators, rather than proving a universal rule for every channel. For someone working between brands and creators, the research raises a relevant question about how platform formats change the economics of making content. A format can attract viewing time while changing the opportunities to place advertisements or build a sponsored piece. The interests of the platform, the creator and the advertiser need separate consideration. The research adds that wider setting to Garnes’s longstanding interest in what a campaign returns.

The price of a recommendation

Garnes’s public discussions of marketing often return to fairly ordinary arithmetic. In one podcast example, a product with a $100 retail price costs a merchant $25 to make and $5 to ship. Offering it to a creator represents a different cost from paying the creator $100 in cash.

The example is hypothetical, but the distinction is useful. A creator might value receiving a product; a merchant must account for what supplying it actually costs. Starting there produces a more precise conversation about what each party is offering, and what a partnership would have to return.

He also questions assumptions inside his own marketing budget. Describing an experiment with branded search advertising, he said Upfluence tested what happened when it stopped bidding on some branded keywords. Organic traffic captured much of the demand. His lesson was to measure a familiar practice before accepting the justification for continuing it.

That habit helps explain his emphasis on revenue in creator marketing. A partnership can attract attention and still leave a merchant uncertain about its commercial result. Affiliate arrangements, trackable sales and a clear account of costs give the conversation somewhere firmer to stand.

“We turn creator marketing into a revenue channel.”

Vivien Garnes

Two CEOs, one long conversation

Garnes and Creusy have kept the shared chief executive arrangement. Their company operates across borders, but the working relationship also has the accumulated history of the early retail experiment. Each has been present for the changes in what Upfluence sells and how it sells it.

Garnes’s personal introduction extends well beyond that title. He lists himself as a co-founder of Nakama and a partner in Distillerie du Rhône. He also introduces himself as a father of three and a dog person, with interests in metal, gin and IPA. His website links to music alongside his professional profile.

There is room for a little teasing between colleagues. The company’s AI system, Jaice, takes its name from a reference to Magic: The Gathering. Explaining the choice, Garnes affectionately invoked Creusy’s enthusiasm for the game. A product built to handle campaign administration arrives with a trace of its founders’ private enthusiasms.

The follow-up email gets an assistant

In September 2026, Upfluence presented a broader campaign system built around Jaice. Its described responsibilities include finding creators, preparing outreach and helping handle the exchanges that follow. The ambition reaches back to the original merchant problem: the partnership might be worthwhile, if arranging it did not consume quite so much time.

Garnes says uncertain situations should go to a human. The founders argue that time recovered from routine administration can go toward calls, events and closer collaboration with creators. That is their proposed use for the capacity the software frees, and a practical standard against which customers can judge it.

The route from the ties to Jaice has involved several forms of education: a small shop, campaign work for clients, software development and a doctoral defense. Through each, Garnes has kept returning to the work surrounding a recommendation. Somebody has to find the right person, agree on the exchange and decide whether the result justified the effort.

The ties eventually left the living room. The problem proved considerably harder to get rid of. Garnes has made a career of giving it his attention.