Bambuser wins 2021 LVMH Innovation Award

Start-up Bambuser that specialises in live stream shopping events has been crowned the 2021 LVMH Innovation Award overall winner.

Bambuser aims to bridge the gap between online and offline buying experience and allows brands to host live shopping sessions online with influencers or sales associates. These shows are hosted natively on the brands’ websites, enabling them to possess the appearance and feel of the experience and manage conversations, data and check-out. The start-up’s clients include Parfums Christian Dior, Ted Baker, Farfetch, Frame, Tommy Hilfiger and LuisaViaRoma.

The start-up was chosen as the overall winner of the 2021 LVMH Innovation Awards by Bernard Arnault, LVMH chairman and chief executive officer, Toni Belloni, LVMH group managing director, and the members of the choice committee.

As winners, Bambuser will receive half a year of “personalised support” within LVMH’s accelerator programme, ‘La Maison des Start-ups,’ based at the Station F start-up campus in Paris.

Commenting on the win, Sophie Abrahamsson, chief commercial officer at Bambuser, said in a statement: “At Bambuser we are on a mission to improve retail. We are so proud to donate to do this with the LVMH Group. Any start-up needs a lot more than just a mission to achieve success: a dedicated and very skilled team that doesn’t take no for a remedy, and that one important customer who believes in you and really wants to trail-blaze with you, and that's what LVMH is to us.”

In addition to being overall winners, Bambuser also won the Omnichannel and Retail Experience award.

LVMH announces 2021 Innovation Award winners
The 2021 LVMH Innovation Awards received a lot more than 850 entries from around the world. The blissful luxury conglomerate selected 28 start-ups from 12 different countries as finalists for his or her method of the theme ‘The Future of Customer Experience is Here’.

Alongside the overall winner, awards received out across six different categories: Data and Artificial Intelligence, Employee Experience, Media and Brand Awareness, Omnichannel and Retail Experience, Operations and Manufacturing Excellence, and Sustainability.

For the very first time in the awards five year history, six start-ups received awards rather than three in previous years.

Each of the start-ups “stood out from the competition” within their respective categories said LVMH in a statement, and all “embody excellence in its particular specialization, with products or services that are assisting to shape the customer connection with the future”.

French start-up, Data&Data founded by Zouheir Guedri won the Data and Artificial Intelligence category because of its capability to analyse large volumes of transactions carried out on international marketplaces to help luxury companies fine-tune their marketing strategies. Data&Data was among the startups that participated in the fourth season of LVMH’s La Maison des Startups accelerator programme at Station F.

Each One was recognised for Employee Experience. The start-up created in 2015 by Fanny Prigent, Maxime Baudet and Théo Scubla aims to improve the visibility of refugees and migrants with work permits by putting them touching multinational companies.

England-based game publisher and developer Aglet, founded by Ryan Mullins in 2019 received the Media and Brand Awareness award for its game enabling sneaker fans to earn in-game currency, compete with other players and accumulate limited-edition virtual sneakers created by a number of the world’s leading brands.

The Operations and Manufacturing Excellence award was won by Hipli launched in 2020 by Anne-Sophie Raoult and Léa Got. Hipli designs and produces reusable packaging, aswell as supplying a service allowing consumers to easily post the packaging back again to its sorting centres using the prepaid label. Just one year following its creation, Hipli already operates in nine countries across Europe.

The ultimate award for sustainability was awarded to Galy, a US-headquartered start-up founded by Luciano Bueno and Paula Elbl. Galy premiered to address the issue of excess water and pesticide use in cotton production and will be offering apparel brands cotton grown from cells in bioreactors.

LVMH group managing director, Toni Belloni, added: “Innovation can be an absolute obsession at LVMH. It’s what allows us to continually heighten the appeal and desirability of our Maisons. We fuse luxury and technology together, and the finalists of the 2021 Innovation Award provides us their capacity to nourish this come across even more. Their entrepreneurial spirit joins and inspires our own.”