E-commerce and brands

A complete e-commerce system

Band-Band began in May 2015, before the Apple Watch was officially available. The original idea was a website where people could exchange the half-straps we expected to find spare in the box.

When that assumption proved wrong, I pivoted the project towards selling straps. The origin still explains both the name and how I work: test an idea, look at reality, then adapt the product.

Space Pepper

The first Black Friday validated the market and accelerated Band-Band's awareness. In 2016, the activity, previously run through my sole-trader status, became Space Pepper SAS and my full-time work.

That same year, we moved into our first offices at the Le Prologue business incubator in Labège. The company now owns Band-Band, BandClip and ETERNEL.

Band-Band

As a watch enthusiast, I had worn a watch with a leather strap I loved since I was 18. My interest in technology pulled me towards the Apple Watch, but its leather straps were expensive and did not appeal to me.

That tension shaped Band-Band, then BandClip, an adapter designed to use an existing strap with the Apple Watch. Present before the watch's official release, Band-Band became the longstanding French leader in the Apple Watch strap market.

ETERNEL

I first tested French-made leather straps under Band-Band. Once the concept was validated, I led the creation of ETERNEL with the team, launching it in 2017 as a dedicated brand for high-end Apple Watch leather straps.

The range later expanded to cases and other products while preserving a coherent experience across product, finish, presentation and customer relationship.

Team and management

Hiring, team management and coordination of vendors and partners.

Technology and platforms

I built the first storefronts myself on WordPress and WooCommerce: the site, the theme, the product pages and the checkout. I also hosted and ran them, servers included.

When WooCommerce could no longer handle peak periods such as Christmas or Black Friday, I taught myself cloud architecture, then designed, deployed and operated the stores' AWS infrastructure: EC2 with Auto Scaling, load balancing, security groups, RDS and Redis. I also tried a deployment on Elastic Beanstalk with LiteSpeed and dynamic caching — inconclusive, but it showed me that the real bottleneck was WooCommerce itself.

That architecture brought stability and responsiveness without removing the complexity, the maintenance cost or the dependency on plugins. ETERNEL moved to Shopify before the end of 2024, followed by Band-Band in early 2025: more speed, more security, simpler operations and better cost control. I led both migrations, and I now maintain the features and the app ecosystem of both stores.

Acquisition and SEO

SEO, content, paid acquisition, CRM and retention.

Operations and logistics

A successful sale also depends on what happens after the click: product availability, preparation quality, delivery, returns and customer care.

I also introduced tools for monitoring, customer-care assistance, restocking and reducing logistics errors. How they work remains internal; their public purpose is simple: reduce repetitive work and help the team operate more effectively.

Trade-offs

Steering by margins, cash and stock, and trade-offs between technology, sales, brand and operations.

Verified results

Band-Band and ETERNEL now represent 70,000 customers and 57,000 orders. The current team has ten people, and the products are available in more than fifty French retail locations with worldwide delivery.

Those results were built over time by improving the offer, acquisition, storefront, operations, product quality and customer care together.

Lessons

I am proud to have sustained a company and brands for more than ten years from an idea born in a Toulouse apartment. We were early because we had a vision; we are still here because of product quality, respect for customers and strong after-sales care.

The experience taught me to see a product as a complete system. A good interface is not enough if the offer is confusing, stock is wrong or the team cannot fulfil the promise.