Fauve Doucet decided to leave a great job in marketing to launch Partage Club, a mobile application for lending objects. In addition to saving us money, this service aims to develop another form of wealth: social ties.
It was during the summer of 2021 that the idea began to germinate. At that time, Fauve Doucet was a recognized professional in her trade. She works for Cossette, one of Canada’s largest communications agencies. She directs the National Media Design Division and has won several distinctions for projects carried out within the firm.
His professional career, however, took a completely different direction. It all clicked when she realized how much her children were hoarding toys: “I was nervous when they received the Paw Patrol control tower,” she laughs. At Christmas or the holidays, “we sometimes left with four Costco bags full of toys,” says the mother of two children. She then lived in an apartment on the island of Montreal in which she had little space. The ecological impact linked to the manufacture of these toys was also beginning to concern her. His first business idea then took the form of a loan between parents platform. For various reasons, the project did not come to fruition. But the seed had germinated.
(Re)learning to trust
At the same time, the ex-executive was followed by a coach professional. During a work session, the latter makes him aware of a central value of his personality: trust. For her, it is important that people trust her, that the people in her teams trust each other, and that she can trust the people she meets.
This value will become the DNA of his new company: “I launched Partage Club and realized some time later that it was perhaps the first social network based on trust. For her, the loan is a good excuse to get in touch with her neighbours, but above all it’s a wonderful opportunity to forge bonds of trust. One thing leading to another, Fauve Doucet’s idea took shape: Partage Club will be the first unlimited and secure loan platform between neighbors in Quebec.
From intrapreneurship to entrepreneurship
Becoming an entrepreneur was not necessarily in Fauve Doucet’s career plans. The new head of the company nevertheless admits having the fiber and having always been an “intrapreneur” at heart: “I have often taken the lead and innovated in the organizations for which I have worked. »
Today, if she acknowledges that the worlds of marketing and advertising “stimulate a form of overconsumption”, she remains convinced that good communication is essential to deploy sustainable projects.
It is thanks to her journey and her personal journey that she finally decides to take the plunge with Partage Club, in March 2022. She therefore leaves her job and launches a pilot project to test the loan service, by a group Facebook. “I still wondered several times if it was really reasonable to leave my super job for a Facebook group,” she says with self-deprecation.
Initial reactions to the pilot project are enthusiastic. Partage Club will be officially launched before Christmas, but it is already possible to register. At the time of this writing, at the end of November, the platform already had a community of 1200 members. Fauve Doucet is delighted with the enthusiasm around the project and is now eager to see it unfold in real life.
A first version of this text was published on Onepointfive.ca September 26, 2022.
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the To have to, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of To have to did not take part.