Launchmetrics Unveils AI-Powered Solutions to Redefine Brand Performance in its Tenth Anniversary Year

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PARIS – Launchmetrics, a global leader in data research and insights for the fashion, luxury, and beauty industries, is commemorating its tenth anniversary with a strategic pivot, introducing a sophisticated suite of new products engineered to harness the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence (AI). This ambitious expansion aims to extract deeper qualitative value from its extensive data sets, providing brands with unprecedented tools to navigate an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving competitive landscape. The announcement marks a significant milestone for the company, signaling a shift from merely reporting performance to actively shaping it, as articulated by Michael Jais, Chief Executive Officer of Launchmetrics.

Table of Contents

A Decade of Data-Driven Innovation

Founded a decade ago, Launchmetrics quickly established itself as an indispensable resource for brands seeking to quantify their marketing efforts. The company is perhaps best known for its proprietary Media Impact Value (MIV) measure, an algorithm-driven metric that estimates the monetary value of coverage across social networks, digital platforms, and traditional media. MIV has become an industry benchmark, enabling brands to objectively assess the effectiveness of their campaigns, influencer collaborations, and public relations strategies. Its widespread adoption underscores the industry’s increasing reliance on data-driven decision-making, moving beyond traditional metrics to understand the tangible impact of brand visibility.

Jais highlighted the company’s forward-looking vision, stating, "Looking ahead, our focus is on taking measurement into its next phase, expanding analytics beyond quantitative performance into a strategic, qualitative intelligence layer that generates deeper insight and guides the decisions shaping tomorrow’s global brands, enabling them to move from reporting performance to actively shaping it." This philosophy underpins the development of three groundbreaking solutions, slated for global rollout by early 2027, which promise to revolutionize how brands perceive, analyze, and optimize their market presence.

Strategic Growth and Synergistic Acquisitions

Launchmetrics’ journey to its current standing has been marked by strategic growth, including key acquisitions designed to expand its data capabilities and geographic reach. In 2019, the company acquired Imaxtree, a prominent visual content creator and distributor, which significantly bolstered its access to high-quality fashion imagery and event coverage. This was followed in 2020 by the acquisition of Parklu, a leading Chinese influencer analytics platform, which provided critical insights into the burgeoning Asian market and the complex dynamics of its social media landscape. These acquisitions steadily enriched Launchmetrics’ data sets, laying the groundwork for more sophisticated analytical offerings.

A pivotal moment in Launchmetrics’ recent history was its own acquisition by Lectra in 2024. Lectra, a French technology company specializing in fashion, automotive, and furniture industries, brought a new dimension to Launchmetrics’ strategic direction. Post-acquisition, Launchmetrics has recalibrated its approach, integrating Lectra’s complementary solutions, such as Retviews, a real-time pricing intelligence tool, and Neteven, a marketplace management solution. This synergy has broadened Launchmetrics’ capabilities, enabling it to offer not only enhanced qualitative analysis and recommendations to its existing network of 1,700 clients but also to attract new customers, particularly senior C-suite executives grappling with market challenges.

The integration with Lectra’s tools comes at a crucial time. The global luxury market, while resilient in many aspects, has faced headwinds and a general slump in spending volumes in recent years, particularly affecting discretionary purchases. This economic climate intensifies the pressure on brands to optimize every aspect of their operations, from product development and marketing to pricing and distribution. "As volumes aren’t increasing, the onus is on price management," Jais observed, underscoring the critical need for advanced tools that can help brands maintain profitability and market relevance in a constrained environment.

The AI Imperative: Redefining Brand Intelligence

The introduction of generative AI into Launchmetrics’ product suite is a direct response to the evolving demands of the fashion and luxury sectors. AI, particularly generative AI, has emerged as a game-changer across industries, capable of processing vast amounts of unstructured data, identifying subtle patterns, and generating predictive insights. In the context of brand performance, this translates into the ability to move beyond mere quantitative metrics to understand the nuances of brand perception, identity, and market positioning.

The global AI market size was valued at over $150 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow exponentially, with significant penetration expected in marketing and customer experience sectors. Within fashion and luxury, AI applications range from supply chain optimization and personalized shopping experiences to trend forecasting and hyper-targeted advertising. Launchmetrics’ embrace of generative AI signifies a move towards a more holistic and predictive approach to brand strategy, allowing brands to not just react to market changes but proactively shape their future.

Unpacking the New Product Suite: A Deeper Dive

Launchmetrics’ three new solutions represent a concerted effort to provide brands with a comprehensive toolkit for strategic intelligence.

1. Unveiling Brand Identity: Soul, Substance, and Style

The first new tool, initially teased last year and now poised for a global rollout, delves into the intricate layers of brand identity. It moves beyond superficial metrics to gauge not just brand reach, but also its core identity, visibility, and relevance. Michael Jais elaborated on this innovative approach: "The idea is to analyze a brand as we would a person, based on three key criteria which are soul, substance and style."

Soul: This dimension explores the brand’s intrinsic values, purpose, heritage, and emotional resonance with its audience. It seeks to understand the brand’s narrative and its connection to broader cultural trends.
Substance: This refers to the brand’s tangible offerings, including product quality, innovation, craftsmanship, and functional benefits. It assesses the brand’s credibility and its ability to deliver on its promises.
Style: This encompasses the brand’s aesthetic, visual identity, communication style, and overall presentation. It analyzes how the brand expresses itself across all touchpoints, from campaigns to store design.

In total, Launchmetrics has developed 36 distinct characteristics – 12 for each of these three segments – against which it can benchmark an impressive 10,000 brands. This granular analysis allows brands to pinpoint their unique positioning within the competitive landscape, identify areas for differentiation, and refine their brand narrative to resonate more deeply with target consumers. For C-suite executives, especially those in luxury facing a downturn, understanding these intrinsic values and competitive standing becomes paramount for strategic planning and maintaining brand equity. This tool offers a data-driven blueprint for strengthening a brand’s core identity, a crucial defense against market volatility.

2. Navigating the LLM-Driven Digital Landscape

The second solution addresses the profound shifts occurring in online consumer behavior, particularly among younger demographics. With the rise of AI agents and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, the traditional pathways to brand discovery and purchasing decisions are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Jais highlighted this seismic shift: "Nowadays, 70 to 75 percent of Gen Z no longer use Google, but instead turn to ChatGPT or Claude for brand recommendations. It’s absolutely essential that we integrate LLMs into our analysis of brand perception."

This change has significant implications for how brands approach their digital presence and allocate advertising budgets. LLMs, unlike traditional search engines, often prioritize information from owned media – digital channels a company directly controls, such as its website, blog, and official social media profiles – and traditional media, which provides authoritative and curated content. This contrasts sharply with the previous decade’s trend where brands heavily diversified their budgets towards online content creators and influencer marketing, often at the expense of owned and traditional media.

The predicted outcome is a revolution in advertising spending. The voice of influencers, which previously commanded a significant portion of earned media, "will probably decrease," Jais projected. This doesn’t mean the end of influencer marketing, but rather a rebalancing of the marketing mix. Brands will need to invest more in optimizing their owned digital assets for LLM discoverability, ensuring their brand narrative and product information are accurately and comprehensively represented in these AI-driven recommendation engines. This further reinforces the need for a very balanced strategic approach to marketing mix, where the authenticity and authority of owned and traditional media regain prominence alongside carefully selected influencer collaborations. The ability to analyze brand perception within LLMs will provide brands with critical insights into how their identity is being interpreted and recommended by these powerful new gatekeepers of information.

3. Strategic Pricing: Bridging Desirability and Perceived Value

The third tool zeroes in on the critical aspect of pricing, aiming to establish a robust connection between brand desirability and perceived value. In a market where luxury spending is under pressure, arbitrary pricing strategies can be detrimental. Jais cautioned against an overreliance on desirability alone: "You can’t define brand identity through the prism of desirability alone, as some brands are doing. Desirability matters as long as you have built a foundation of trust."

This solution leverages AI to analyze market data, competitive pricing, consumer sentiment, and brand perception (as identified by the first tool) to help brands optimize their pricing strategies. It moves beyond simple cost-plus or competitor-matching models, integrating qualitative factors that influence a customer’s willingness to pay. By understanding the intricate relationship between a brand’s emotional appeal (desirability), its perceived quality and reliability (trust), and its competitive positioning, brands can set prices that maximize revenue while reinforcing brand equity. This is particularly relevant when integrated with Lectra’s Retviews tool, which provides real-time competitive pricing intelligence, allowing Launchmetrics to offer a truly holistic view of pricing strategy.

Financial Performance and Future Outlook

Despite the broader market turbulence, Launchmetrics has demonstrated robust financial health. According to Lectra’s most recent annual results, Launchmetrics posted annual recurring revenue (ARR) of 45 million euros in 2025, representing a healthy 8.7 percent year-over-year growth. The company also achieved an impressive EBITDA margin before non-recurring items of 17.5 percent, underscoring its operational efficiency and solid business model. With a dedicated team of over 450 professionals, Launchmetrics has successfully navigated the complexities of the current economic climate, positioning itself for future expansion.

Jais characterized 2024 and 2025 as periods of "recalibration" – a strategic pause to integrate acquisitions, refine its technological stack, and develop these ambitious new AI-powered solutions. This preparatory phase is now culminating in a major push towards enhanced performance analytics. The new product suite will be formally unveiled to clients this fall through a series of special events in key fashion capitals, including Paris and Milan. The CEO expressed strong optimism for the coming years: "We think that 2027 and 2028 are going to be big years for us because we’re going to release these new products that are very different from what we’ve done so far."

Broader Industry Impact and Implications

Launchmetrics’ strategic pivot, driven by generative AI, carries significant implications for the broader fashion, luxury, and beauty industries.

For Brands: The new tools promise a paradigm shift from reactive reporting to proactive strategic intelligence. Brands will gain an unprecedented ability to understand their intrinsic identity, optimize their digital footprint for an AI-first world, and implement nuanced pricing strategies rooted in both desirability and trust. This holistic view is crucial for maintaining relevance and profitability in a fiercely competitive market, especially as consumer behavior continues to fragment and evolve.
For Marketing Agencies: The changes in how Gen Z discovers brands and the potential shift in advertising budgets will force marketing agencies to re-evaluate their strategies. Expertise in optimizing for LLMs, crafting compelling owned media content, and integrating traditional media with digital efforts will become increasingly vital. The role of influencer marketing will likely evolve, requiring more sophisticated measurement and integration with broader brand objectives rather than standalone campaigns.
For Fashion Tech Competitors: Launchmetrics’ move sets a new benchmark for innovation in fashion technology. Competitors in the brand intelligence and marketing analytics space will be compelled to accelerate their own AI integration efforts to remain competitive. The emphasis on qualitative analysis and predictive insights, rather than just quantitative metrics, represents a significant advancement that other players will need to emulate.
The Future of Brand Measurement: The industry is moving towards a more integrated and intelligent form of brand measurement, where data from various touchpoints (social media, traditional press, owned channels, AI recommendations, sales data) is analyzed holistically to provide actionable insights. Launchmetrics’ new suite accelerates this trend, paving the way for a future where brands can truly understand and shape their destiny with unparalleled precision.

In conclusion, Launchmetrics’ tenth anniversary marks not just a celebration of past achievements but a bold declaration of its future direction. By leveraging generative AI, the company is equipping fashion, luxury, and beauty brands with the advanced intelligence needed to thrive in a rapidly changing world. The journey from MIV to comprehensive AI-powered strategic insights underscores Launchmetrics’ enduring commitment to innovation and its pivotal role in shaping the next era of brand performance.