Digital Product Passports: Beyond the NFT Hype – with Delphine Eddé, CMO of Arianee | S3 E53

Delphine: 1:09

What we've learned very early on is how to adapt to your audience, and I think the key to our success was adapting content to a local audience when whatever they were having was international content, either translated or badly adapted. But I think the key is to understand local insights and then work around that.

Joeri: 1:36

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm so excited to be joined by Delphine. Delphine, how are you?

Delphine: 1:49

Hi Joeri, I'm very well, great this morning. Thank you, how are you?

Joeri: 1:54

I'm good too, Delphine. I think we were both last week in Paris. For me it was really a short stay because I had to go to Lisbon, but I met some nice people during the week of NFTs Paris Always like to network with people, and that's actually what we're doing a bit too today now on the podcast. But now people are maybe wondering who is Delphine. Delphine Eddé is the CMO and part of Arianee she's. That's a pioneer blockchain project focused on retail use cases.

Joeri: 2:26

Arianee is developing user- owned data for circular economy, thus enabling brands such as Brightly, panarai, mogular, monkler, IWC, and YSL Beauty to create digital product passports for real world assets. I think that's a really interesting subject, and so since 2000, delphine, you have been leading Arianee's marketing and communication strategies. Arianee has raised a total of 20 million dollar in venture capital and works with global brands, including Richmond Group, l'oreal, brightly, and so I already mentioned them. To start off, Delphine, we will for sure talk about what you're doing at Arianee, but I'm also interested to know because, with all your career of 25 years across the diverse geographies and industries, what inspired your journey into bridging the gap between fashion and technology, and especially with your focus on sustainability and circularity.

Delphine: 3:30

Okay, that's a lot. So first of all, again, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be part of this CMO podcast series with you and, as you were saying, we're both at NFTs Paris last week and it was quite hectic, so I'm like just out of a crazy week. I think NFTs Paris is on the map of one of the best events around Web3 today in Europe, definitely Hopefully tomorrow in the world. I know Europe and France is a very important place for Web3 industry and we have lots of stakeholders and lots of really good players. So it was a very rich couple of last days.

Delphine: 4:11

And so, if we go back to my journey, I didn't really have a plan. It's not that I was 20 years old and I was like, okay, this is my plan and I'm going to end up in Web3 at the time. But years later Web3 was not on the map, definitely when you. I knew I was always interested in tech, but more the part around usage for the end user. I'm not an engineer myself. I was always interested in how tech can help, brands can help people, what are the different usages. So I guess what really drove me was curiosity One tech at a time. So I started my career and internet was just starting and people were telling me like they told me three years ago you're crazy, what are you doing in this space? You're not a tech person, you don't. Maybe this is going to die. We don't understand it. And so I guess curiosity and leading and paving the way for users and brands I guess this is really the driver for me.

Delphine: 5:17

And then again, I didn't have a plan, so my journey I grew organic, from working in big communication agencies and companies to media companies like Kondinas that I started my own company in the media field in the Middle East Maybe we'll talk about this a little bit later. It was just one opportunity after another one, and it's more about the people I met and at what time in my life I met them, and things just unfolded like this. So, yeah, and why fashion and luxury? I think it was really one of my first interests. It was fashion and luxury. One of my first internships was at Chanel, and I think this was a very formative internship for me, and so since then, I guess I tried to mix both, with more or less success.

Joeri: 6:10

Yeah.

Delphine: 6:11

And maybe one thing also that led my choices and my career and the way maybe I talk about this today is I like. Really, this rule for me is first you do and you discover, and then you talk about it or you tell the rest of the world what you did, and I've always gone by that rule. I'm really a doer, I think.

Joeri: 6:32

I love that. It's making your own way. Instead of following like the part that is already there, you make your own part and actually what I did that do? Because people sometimes say, Joeri, what are you doing now with this Web3? And before Web3, I was into social media marketing and then we ordered, I had a business analytics company and doing stuff and people are always saying what are you?

Delphine: 7:00

and it's weird because I felt like from very early on, people were telling me okay, you need one interest, you need a passion, you need one thing to focus on. Maybe it's part of the education system and so on, I don't know. And for me, I always felt like I don't want to be in a box. I want to do a lot of things in my life, I want to touch so many industries. Don't put me in a box. And I feel now, with looking back, maybe it all makes sense now, like all this leading to this extremely innovative technology, leading to this challenge of creating a new, more virtuous internet for brands and users alike.

Joeri: 7:41

All makes for me also. It's everyone has its story. So for me, we have three. I had this investment club, I had this business analytics company. I was into marketing. It comes together for me. Okay, this is now the thing I should do. So, just like you don't expect it that it will happen, but it's an opportunity, and I say, okay, I want to do this. So now, Delphine, so you are at Arianee and so I would like to learn a bit. So what you're doing and what is the vision that you have there?

Delphine: 8:10

So what I really liked when I joined the company. I'm not one of the founders, but I joined quite early on and I'm a partner now and I'm very proud of that. I liked that they started working on a tech in 2018. And this tech is still, and the vision and the tech behind Arianee is still the same. Of course, we're evolving and optimizing at all time, but our vision was always the same it's to build a framework for a more virtuous internet, empowering brands and users alike to control their data.

Delphine: 8:45

So what I think is interesting to understand in this space is the ownership notion and once even me not coming from this industry originally or not being one of the very first one what I really liked when I joined is that notion of ownership and once I understood this, you see all the users, just that can unfold in front of you and all the possibility, and this is really what I love about this and so what we do at Arianee. So you explain a little bit, but maybe to go in more details in 2018, we created a protocol, an open source, open access protocol, and since then, we developed a digital product passport, solutions for brands to enable a better user engagement and better circulary for brands. Should I maybe remind people who are listening what is a digital product passport? Yes, please, because we used to call it .

Joeri: 9:45

That's what was going to be my question. So yes, for some people, of course, know it, but others don't. So please explain in words for market entrepreneurs what is a digital product passport?

Delphine: 9:57

Digital product passport, or as we call it, connects physical products with their digital identity and it offers important information on the origin of the product, the history of the product and, of course, the ownership of the product.

Delphine: 10:16

So DPP can serve many, if you want, purposes or objectives like traceability, authentication, but also what is very important for us is like post purchases, services like repair, resell, access to exclusive personalized brand experience, and all this leading to a better user engagement.

Delphine: 10:40

And so we've always been on that, except that bear market loss here in the crypto industry and NFTs and the word NFT and the hype around NFT started to slow down a little bit, and for us, we wanted to get away a little bit from this hype because, from the very beginning, Arianee is not about speculation and what we do is not about NFT that you can speculate around because it's linked to a physical product, and so that's why we decided, in terms of semantics, to change a little bit the way we were seeing what we were doing.

Delphine: 11:20

So we went, for example, from NFT for brands to digital product passports, but at the end, it's the same solution. Yeah, so this is what we do. This is how we envision this world, what it can do to brands and users and I really believe the technology, the blockchain technology, is here to stay and it's still a very new industry, so things are changing, things are moving, but the basics and the infrastructure and the vision and the principles of the blockchain are here to stay and they are really very fundamental principles and important principles Like ownership, decentralization, of course.

Joeri: 12:02

Absolutely, like you said, at the word NFT, people think about high perspeculation, but when I'm talking about it, I talk about utilities behind these NFTs and the technology. And actually I love this word, the digital product passport. It's like a positive word. I feel like comparing it. It's NFT technology. If you are in a store and you pay with your credit card, you just know, okay, this is this brand and you pay. You don't, I think, what is happening behind the scenes, so you don't worry about it. So if it's just a word, a technology, so a digital product passport, as you said, has a really good utility.

Delphine: 12:41

Yeah, and if I may add a little bit to that, because we often have this question, a digital product passport can be off-chain or on-chain. Obviously, what we do at Arianee is that we put this information on-chain and we need to make a difference here because we see what will empower users and brands to go a step further and add value to the experience with the product, with the brand, is when the passport is on-chain. The level of services, of personalization that you get is without comparison to just a DPP, where you can just read information about a product but there are no interactions whatsoever.

Joeri: 13:27

I think there is, but you're talking about all of this. My head spins a bit with all these possibilities. It's such a positive story that you can tell. Like I said, I was also in Paris and people are talking about this digital product passport and this is really some of the positive stories I want to tell. I really want to have you on the podcast, Delphine. But another story you mentioned in the beginning a big part of your career or life have been in the Middle East. So you have founded WebPedia Arabia and they have let it to become a significant media presence in the Middle East. So, yeah, maybe we can talk a bit about that and maybe there are some lessons to learn from that.

Delphine: 14:13

Always lessons to learn from any experience. 2008, we decided to move to the Middle East. So I was telling you earlier, I'm originally Lebanese and, with my partner at the time, we decided that we wanted to create something, and when I arrived in the Middle East, I saw that there was nothing, absolutely nothing done around women and women content online, and we started with this. The context for me was I was coming out of a really nice experience at Condé Nast, where I was head of digital there for France, though, heading publications online like Vogue and La Mour and so on, and I was like, how come the only websites in the Middle East at that time were around finance and football, and Yahoo was still a big player and then not anymore? So we decided to create very niche website to start with targeted audiences, and we started like this with women, targeting luxury, fashion, beauty, entertainment, wedding, cooking, parenting and so on, and to, at the end, build really strong media brands in each of those verticals, ending up with gaming, because gaming was quite big at the time, like a few years later, but it became quite big and big also with women, and I think I was very proud to do something in this region for women, because the social context is a bit different there than it is in Europe.

Delphine: 15:46

Saudi Arabia was our main market, Dubai was our business hub, lebanon was our like kitchen office with a lot of content production, developers and so on. And so we founded the company. Original name was Diwanee. It became Webedia because Webedia eventually became a partner table. I'll just tell the list of stories, because now I work at Arihini and it ends with two E as well, and that was not planned at all, but I like the link. And so Diwanee in Arabic is the place where people gather. It's like a living room where people gather and exchange great ideas or talk about big ideas, and the Diwanee with the E at the end means like it's mine, it's like the possessive pronoun, so this is where it comes from. I really love this thing. So Diwanee became eventually Webedia.

Delphine: 16:44

Arabia after Wabidya took over and bought us, and so lessons from that. So I think there's two categories maybe of lessons. Lessons as an entrepreneur Okay, you have ups and down and it's emotional roller coaster and all that. We've heard it like many times Overnight success, that last 10 years, like, oh, they had an overnight supply. Yeah, they've been working on it for the past 10 years. Whatever you want, whatever makes the story right, more shiny, such a.

Delphine: 17:18

So I think for me, what is important, what was important, is that my team, or the team I built, was the key to everything, and your team is key to anything you build, and it's one of the biggest challenges building the right team for what you want to achieve. And at that time, in that region, internet was not an industry. No one was working in the digital content business, for example. So it was really a challenge and we had to train a lot of people, and I'm very proud of that, especially when some of my team members then were recruited by people like Google at the time, or Meta or so on, or L'Oreal, or so that was one of the biggest challenge.

Delphine: 18:01

And another challenge that is maybe more standard wherever you are in the world, is that it's very easy to start a company. You have an idea and you decide to start, and it's easy. The real challenge is how you manage the growth of this company Growth in terms of revenue and how much capital do you need. Growth in terms of people, growth in terms of what you want to develop, geographically, for example, and this I didn't expect. So I think this is maybe, to sum it up, two big lessons in terms of as an entrepreneur and then in terms of business. What we've learned very early on is how to adapt to your audience, and I think the key to our success was adapting content to a local audience when whatever they were having was international content, either translated or badly adapted. But I think the key is to understand local insights and then work around that. So, yeah, that's what I would say.

Joeri: 19:08

Yeah, that's like 15 years in an accent. Yeah, it's, but what I wasn't going to say, it's an interesting challenge. Of course, like you have a local audience. Like I'm in Belgium. People around me, they speak Dutch. My audience is global, so I always try to speak the same language, but it is not possible because you speak to one and then it's I'm less likely to connect with local people because I speak that in English, but then the audience is bigger. So that was for me also a difficult choice to make, like my speaking my own language for my audience or doing it in English. So yeah, as an entrepreneur, you need to make decisions and you need to choose your path and so on and not hate it too much because for you also, you speak different languages. Same for me, like I have less an accent. I don't have an accent in Dutch and less in French than I have in English, but it didn't stop me right?

Delphine: 20:01

You can't let that stop you, otherwise you don't do it. You don't do anything?

Joeri: 20:05

Yeah, I didn't, it's right. And so now and also Delphine we live an interesting time. So a lot is changing with AI, with now Metaverse we already mentioned NFTs. So these technologies, how are they impacting what you're doing today? Or do you see a certain evolution now for Arianee in the next period?

Delphine: 20:31

So that's an interesting transition because we're talking about the Middle East and for me, like you talk about fast moving goods. For me, we were working with fast moving audiences at the time in a very fast moving and chaotic region and I think this was also maybe one of the lessons. But it's interesting when you would now work in web tree. That is also a fast moving and quite chaotic industry. I think that experience really helped me managing through ups and downs and difficult times and managing the unknown, basically. So, even if at Ariane, we know where we're going again, our tech is stable, we know where we want to be, the industry is changing fast and it's still evolving, so you have to manage this as well and, honestly, for me, I love this. So I'm not I don't have this like crystal ball. I cannot tell you exactly what's going to happen, but maybe one thing that will change the game and is changing now is how interfaces and layers of APIs for users are changing and are becoming more and more easy to use seamless, no friction.

Delphine: 21:47

We started at Arianee with an app you had to download that was like that was integrating a Web3 wallet. So now something where you get the digital product passport of a product you bought and you find it directly in your clients account of that brand. So in two years or three years, things really change already very fast. If we talk about the metaverse, that's not our topic at Arianee, but okay, hardware and evolution of hardware will make it easy for people, or more easy, to go into diverse virtual worlds or games and so on. And when we started on this central land or like again a couple of years ago, the experience was not really enjoyable. That's, to be very honest, the way it's lagging, and so if you didn't have the right hardware or a gaming PT or something like, there's no way you can enjoy that. And it's getting better and better.

Delphine: 22:51

So, I think yeah. So for me this is important how interface for users will evolve. And the second thing, when we talk about passion and luxury brands, there's one thing we need to keep in mind also always is that for them, and the creative narrative and the creation of the product stays at the heart of what they do, and innovation comes as an enabler to tell their story differently to a wider audience, a younger audience and so on. But I think the evolution of tech is interesting, but for this industry, creation and the creative narrative remains the most important thing and it should remain the most important thing. Tech is a tool, but the story and what you say at the image of the brand and what you represent for people and their creativity that's the heart of it.

Joeri: 23:53

Yeah, totally agree, and you mentioned the heart and so on, and, like now with these VR headsets, it's the same. You have a kind of experience now that in a few years you'll be totally different. Yeah, and so, Delphine, with everything happening within Arianee, but also maybe outside of, and everything that you are doing, what are you now the most excited about? Maybe things you're working on or looking forward to.

Delphine: 24:18

Yeah, what we're building at Arianee, I feel it will help on board and sorry, algorgen, I think with the web tree industry now we are at this turn point where we are willing to onboard the next billion users, and just to be part of this is very exciting. And the way we see it at Arianee is that through brands, we can onboard more and more people on those technology, although, of course, the idea is for people not to see the technology, then to see the benefits of it Again. Digital ownership, better experience with their product and the brand, digital sovereignty over their personal data. Ok, this is something maybe we didn't discuss enough yet, but decentralization is the very important part of the web tree principles, and so we are very respectful of the user's data, and every user keeps its own data. They decide what they want to share, but if they don't want to share anything, then it's fine. We don't have access to personal data. We might have access to behavior, but not personal data.

Joeri: 25:34

Yeah, I love that too, and I think you mentioned them all the different principles. What blockchain or Web3 offers for the good. We really love that. This will get to know you. If you want to add something, feel free, but I also think that if people want to learn more from you, also let us know where we can find you.

Delphine: 25:55

Maybe we discuss. So we discuss the benefits of all this, and maybe there's one part we didn't really tackle is the circularity, and this is a very important principle, specifically now in the fashion industry, the luxury industry. It comes both sides. It's like brands wanting to be more transparent, users asking for more also sustainability information. But also, if you look at the trends of the markets, like the second hand market is gaining more and more market shares year after year. We expect, I think, in the fashion industry, that second hand sales will become like 8% of the total market in 2026 and it's only growing. So it's huge.

Delphine: 26:40

For example, if a brand has DPP for all their products, the DPP enables circularity, enables reselling services, links to resell platform or to the brands maybe own second hand platform tomorrow. DPP enable, for example, services like Repair, because the objective is from how the product never dies. Basically, so you buy it first hand or second hand, you repair it and you keep it alive until you can recycle it. And for brands also, they have new models to invent. How can they decouple growth from first hand production, meaning have more revenues while producing the same amount or less. So how services around first hand production can help brands develop new revenue models and we're working a lot on these days and this is very challenging and very exciting, and we already see some examples in the car industry, in the fashion industry and hopefully, maybe in a year's time I can get more figures and complete it.

Joeri: 27:54

Actually, it's really for everyone, and for the brands, but also for the consumers, and because all the information that you said, if the product has a life, you find it on the digital product passport, right?

Delphine: 28:09

Exactly you stamp it, you have the inverse of everything that happens in this product.

Joeri: 28:15

So, yeah, really exciting use case how it's, hey. So thank you so much, Delphine, for also adding that. And yeah, probably there are a number of other questions that people have of, maybe, things they want to learn or they want to find out more about you, about Arianee. So, yes, where can we send them?

Delphine: 28:33

Yeah, okay, so you can, of course, go to the Arianee website, arianee. com and arianee. org for the protocol information. So it's a bit more on the tech part. And then, of course, we're very present on LinkedIn, on Arianee or on my personal profile, then Shina Idde, very easy and straightforward to find On LinkedIn. I like it because we share some articles, we share some information. It's more lively about what we've been doing and where we were, like again, nfd Paris last week and all the side events around it. And, of course, twitter, telegram, discord for all more of the tech people listening to us. We have a very active group on Discord where we discuss protocol updates, questions, characteristics and so on Great, so people can really find their favorite channel to connect.

Delphine: 29:30

Yeah, they can find it. What Instagram as well?

Joeri: 29:35

People also know, if they are now listening or maybe they are in their car listening to the show that there is an article, there is a blog article for this podcast episode. There are show notes, all the links that we mentioned. You can find them in there. So yeah, Delphine, thank you so much, it was a pleasure.

Delphine: 29:54

Thank you Joeri. Thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone.

Joeri: 29:58

So, guys, again a really lovely episode and I'm sure you learned a lot. So this concept of digital product passports is really something to have a look at and if you think that this podcast episode and this concept is interesting for people around you, be sure to share the episode with them. Be sure to follow the show if you haven't done this yet, and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care. Bye.