Carrefour : Start-ups selected for incubation by Showroomprivé and Carrefour

For the first time, Carrefour will support in 2019 around twenty or so start-ups via Showroomprivé's Look Forward incubator. The selection process for identifying the most promising projects is now under way.

Looking for innovation is one of Carrefour's priorities at all levels of its organisational structure. Online sales website Showroomprivé has been running its incubator for three years now, and the strategic partnership that it entered into at the beginning of this year with Carrefour provides for the creation of a 'retail desk' that the Group will sponsor. Around twenty start-ups will get the support they need in 2019 to help them successfully implement their innovative projects in the mass merchandising sector.

€100,000 of support for each start-up

On 21 November, around thirty start-ups delivered their pitches to a panel that included Thierry Petit, CEO of Showroomprivé, Frédéric Bille, CEO of Beauté-Privée and Clément Marty, the Group's Innovation director. The 18 projects selected will be unveiled in January and each start-up will get €100,000 worth of support from Showroomprivé and Carrefour.

Showroomprivé's support will include hosting at its French and European premises, services at preferential rates (marketing tools, payment solutions, cloud storage space, banking and postal rates), a higher profile (photo shoots, presentation videos, UX and Google analytics audits, product trials) and access to its ecosystem made up of 30 million members and 2000 partner brands.

Special access to Carrefour's ecosystem

Carrefour will also provide its own expertise. The selected start-ups will get special access to mentoring via two-person teams of employees who will provide them with coaching on business-specific issues (marketing, logistics, e-commerce, etc.), sales opportunities in France and internationally, as well as access to the Group's open innovation ecosystem (incubators, investment funds and international monitoring). More than a thousand innovative companies have already been identified over the past couple of years by Carrefour, particularly via the network of partner incubators, such as Smart Food Paris and Lafayette Plug and Play. Since 2015, Carrefour has also been investing in Partech Growth, an investment fund for fast-growing tech and digital companies.

Look Forward by Showroomprive.com is the first European incubator exclusively for the fashion, beauty and design industries. Every year, the incubator provides around twenty start-ups operating in the fashion, beauty and retail sectors with free support - and without acquiring any interests in them. The aim is to enable them to innovate by providing them with digital services and new technologies.