An acquisition announcement from Lectra caught my attention. The company recently acquired Retviews, based in Belgium and founded in 2017. Retviews has developed an innovative technological offering that enables fashion brands to analyze a broad range of real-time market data in order to increase their sales and margins and improve collection efficiency. Today, more than 30 brands use Retviews in France and Belgium, including Sandro, Maje, Etam, Camaïeu, and others. We interviewed Maximilien Abadie, Chief Strategy Officer for Lectra, to learn more. Abadie, 30, has been Chief Strategy Officer since July 1, 2016. He joined the company in 2012 as a project manager and was appointed Strategic Planning Analyst in 2013.

WhatTheyThink: Let’s start with a brief overview of Lectra in case some of our readers are not familiar with the company.

Maximilien Abadie: We are a French technology company delivering solutions to and for companies in the fashion, apparel, automotive, and furniture industries, designed to help them compete in the Industry 4.0 era. When we talk about Industry 4.0, we like to reference the German definition created in January 2011, which states that all the new technology, from cloud-based solutions to automation and more, will create a new industrial revolution in the market, and not only in factories; the whole ecosystem will change. The ultimate goal of brands, suppliers, and manufacturers is to enable companies to produce on demand things that the consumer will want, personalize, and ultimately buy, leveraging all the new technologies available. This will become a reality, although it might take as much as 15 to 20 years. In effect, this reverses the supply chain, from a push model driven by brands, to a pull model driven by consumers.