START-UP STORY: TAKING PARISIAN STREET STYLE GLOBAL

It is 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday and Morgane Sézalory, founder of French clothing and lifestyle brand Sézane, is using a quiet moment before her Paris boutique opens to do some shopping.

“I never have time to shop and when I go online my size is always sold out,” says the 33-year-old, picking out shorts and jeans from the latest collection of the brand she launched five years ago.

That scarcity is familiar to Sézane customers. They queue outside its shop in the trendy Parisian garment district of Sentier to get their hands on limited edition pieces, such as high-waisted jeans, floral sundresses and the “Barry” cardigan — which had a waiting list of more than 30,000 people last year, the company claims.

Ms. Sézalory is one of a new breed of successful entrepreneurs exporting young Parisian street style to the rest of the world. They share a knack for turning a particular kind of nonchalant chic into considerable sales, l a rgely through the medium of Ins tagram — and often with no formal business t ra ining. Many are propelled by the French government’s enthusiasm and backing for technolog y and entrepreneurship.

Investors are betting that demand for Sézane will grow as the “digital native” brand expands beyond France ( currently its biggest market). US private equity firm General Atlantic has just bought a minority stake for an undisclosed sum from a group of investors, including rival private equity group Summit Partners. The brand opened a New York store last year and will open in London’s Notting Hill this year. More store openings are planned, and the company is developing its technology infrastructure, helped by the General Atlantic investment.

Ms. Sézalory believes hers was the first French clothing label to launch solely online rather than through a physical store. Last year 90% of sales were digital.

Her business model is based on four main collections per year, as well as “capsule collections” each month, and has recently expanded into menswear. She declines to comment on revenues but says that Sézane processes between 50,000 and 100,000 orders worldwide each month. “It will sometimes be too slow for the customers, but I want to be independent and I want to learn how to do things and not to rush,” she says.

France’s start- up scene is booming, but Ms. Sézalory is different from the stereotypical HEC business school graduate turned start-up founder. In Sézane’s shop filled with vast indoor plants, she recounts her — as she tells it — almost accidental route to entrepreneurship. “Sézane has never been a brand that was thought up by an Excel spreadsheet. Nothing was planned. I wanted it to be just as I would love it as a customer.”

Ms. Sézalory was born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and moved to Paris when she was four. At 15 she spent a year studying in Arkansas state in the US. “I wanted to do the opposite of my life,” she says. Back in Paris, she studied alone at home for the baccalaureate exams (France’s equivalent of A-levels).

She had grown up an inveterate bargain hunter, scouring flea markets for old furniture, jewellery and clothes. In the early noughties, eBay and online shopping were taking off and “everyone was starting to understand that the internet would change the world,” she recalls. “With eBay I was able to find treasures anywhere in the world, not paying that much for them. I started to collect things.”

When she started to sell on eBay she discovered that she had an eye for photographing and displaying items. She spent the money she earned on buying more vintage items to sell, and soon she says she was making between $ 3,000 and $ 7,000 a month.

In 2008 Ms. Sézalory created Les Composants, a monthly online sale where she put up 100 customized vintage pieces for sale. They would sell out in minutes, so she supplemented the stock by designing her own vintage-inspired items. In 2013 she began designing full time with the support of two business partners: her husband Thibault Lougnon, a venture capitalist turned entrepreneur, and Corentin Petit, who had co- founded the menswear brand Balibaris. She rebranded the website, and Sézane was born.

The company has always been profitable, she claims. “A lot of tech companies or new digital brands raise so much money that they don’t learn how to spend it smartly and it loses the charm.”

Ms. Sézalory has two young daughters. Things got so busy that in 2016 she experienced a type of burnout. “I never felt bad, I just felt so tired,” she says. “I was working so much but when you’re passionate you

Like the right to liberty, we don't know exactly what technology will mean 100 or even 20 years from now, “so because of that the language has these grand strokes about how it attempts to guide policy for a long time,” says Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions. “It does underscore that they are taking the issue quite seriously. I think it's going to be an enduring challenge where there isn't a way to easily get this right. When you ask for a recipe, do we want the search engine to know that you're gluten-free? Maybe we do. And when Amazon gives you a book recommendation, do you want it to know you gave a great review to three other books? Maybe we do. So the privacy challenges are incredible and reflect a completely different type of thinking than we've had in the past.”

WITH CONSTRAINT COMES CREATIVITY

That the GDPR might stanch the flow of information is not all bad, many say. “Firms will have to think more carefully about the data they collect,” says Mr. Bradlow. “Certain kinds will become more popular or relevant. It's not that firms will find ways around what's legal. But they will find legal and appropriate data to collect that they hope will allow them to do targeted advertising.”

In any case, many firms are currently scooping up more data than they actually need for their purposes. “A rule of thumb for good data that is predictive and helpful — if it's creepy, if it makes someone uneasy, then it's probably not very predictive anyway,” says Mr. Fader. Just because you are walking past a Starbucks and your iPhone senses that and shows you an ad doesn't mean you're likely to walk in, he points out. “A lot of stuff isn't really useful, or it's data that is very compelling because you can picture it, as opposed to boring transaction log data. To me that is the gold. Tell me who did what but not the cheap talk about how many stars they gave on Yelp.”

GDPR has elements that are likely bad news for some firms and good news for others, says Wharton marketing professor Ron Berman. “I think it's a big blow to many companies who were using what I would call potentially unethical practices, scraping Facebook without permission or using third- party information on the gray line,” says Mr. Berman. “If you still do contextual advertising and you're not using anyone's private information, this is not going to change anything.”

On the upside, because GDPR also gives customers access to data about themselves if they want it, it means companies can incentivize customers to get that data and pass it on to them. “Which means I can say, ‘If you want better service, give me that data.' So GDPR makes it hard to use this information without consent, but at the same time it opens up a lot of information that was behind closed doors. This way I can learn to better target people on Facebook or Google,” says Mr. Berman.

One example: When customers find products through Google searches, advertisers would like to know what other competing products they considered before they made their choice, so they can target those other keywords for ads, or emphasize the differences from these products. “Now you can ask your best customers to share their search information with you, which would have been hard before,” says Mr. Berman.

For targeting techniques using a person's Facebook “likes,” a company that asks that an ad be shown to everyone who ‘likes' brands A, B and C would be able to have direct access to that information. “In order to be able to target people by their ‘ likes,' you need to know what other brands your customers ‘ like.' Having them download their Facebook data and provide it to you will allow you to do this analysis,” he says.

The potential echoes the kind of crossover appeal that Amazon has leveraged by learning that many of their Prime customers are also Whole Foods customers. “A company can do a similar thing,” says Mr. Berman. “If they are a backpack brand, and they learn that their customers ‘like' a specific clothing brand, they can approach them for a collaboration to create a new clothing/ bag collection, and their customers will be happier.”

WILL THE US ADOPT GDPR-LIKE REGULATIONS?

Should firms beyond the E.U. fear that the GDPR is the thin end of the regulation wedge? GDPR follows of a string of European activity on this issue for more than 20 years, Werbach points out. It's not likely that a US version is coming anytime soon, but perhaps someday, he says. “I think the level of frustration is growing and the Cambridge Analytica case and others have started to change the tenor of the debate. If it's just about privacy, there is a much stronger perspective in the US that this is a market phenomenon as opposed to a human-rights phenomenon. So it's always been hard to succeed in adopting principled privacy legislation when there is such a strong expectation that when there is a problem it's a market failure. I could see more pressure. We weren't that far away during the Obama administration. There was a proposed consumer privacy bill of rights, not as huge as GDPR, but it was the foundation for comprehensive digital privacy legislation. It didn't pass, but it wasn't crazy to think it might have passed Congress. When the political climate changes, yes, I think we'll see things.”

But it will likely take public sentiment to propel government action. What kind of an event could steer public sentiment in the US to get behind GDPR-like regulations here? “I'm not sure I have a great answer,” says Mr. Bradlow, “except I would think if a widespread breach of data happened, with identity theft on a massive scale, that would have a dramatic impact on regulations and society.”

Right now, with the increasing integration of technology into the daily tasks and routines of millions and its corresponding monetization for firms like Google and Facebook, the incentives for doing nothing are only growing.

“At the end of the day, if we ignore the safety and security side for a moment, do consumers benefit? Of course they do,” says Mr. Bradlow. “We get better recommendations, better products and better prices, and a lot of the time we get things for free on the Internet because of targeted advertising. We have to see how things evolve societally. There is an individual difference, there are groups that care about privacy and groups that don't care. It is the classic trade off.”

Which will prevail: the right to be forgotten, or the knowledge that firms have that the public forgets quickly? Cambridge Analytica was probably a wake-up call for Facebook, says Mr. Nave. “But I don't know about for people. I am not convinced that people care and that they have not already forgotten everything about it.”