Juliette de Rivoire was not planning to launch a startup. But the instinct had always been there.
She had grown up surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs. And in Geneva, where she worked in technology consulting for luxury clients including Rolex and Richemont, she found herself repeatedly drawn toward the idea of building. Over time, she created a new business unit from scratch, growing it into a team of around 35 people.
Looking back, the entrepreneurial impulse had been running quietly underneath much of her career already. IMD was simply the moment it became impossible to ignore.
The question that changed everything
Part of that shift happened during the program’s Discovery Expedition to Silicon Valley, when a guest speaker challenged the cohort to think differently about privilege, education, and responsibility. If the most educated and fortunate people in the room were not willing to build something meaningful, he asked, then who would?
“If you guys don’t make a project which has an impact,” he said, “who’s going to do it?”
The question stayed with her. De Rivoire became increasingly preoccupied by the environmental impact of fashion. At the same time, she could see a gap emerging in the resale market for luxury childrenswear, a category people cared about but that remained underserved.
“I love fashion,” she said. “I am driven by sustainability. How can I make this sustainable project cool and profitable?”
A few months after graduating, she launched Kidstorie, a resale platform for luxury childrenswear.
Building through uncertainty
Luxury childrenswear is worn briefly but cared for carefully, almost ideal conditions for a second-hand market, de Rivoire said. Built on that insight, Kidstorie lists pre-loved luxury childrenswear across marketplaces including Vinted, eBay, and Printemps, while also operating a retail corner inside Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Identifying the opportunity was one thing. Building the business was another.
“There are lots of iterations,” de Rivoire said. “You have a plan, but you have to be so agile because the plan changes every month.” One moment Kidstorie was gaining visibility through celebrity clients and television appearances; the next, deals collapsed or expansion plans had to be rethought entirely.
“To navigate through all these ups and downs, resilience is something key to succeed,” she said.
It was a lesson her MBA coach had planted years earlier, challenging the assumption that stability needed to come before ambition. You can do everything at the same time, she had told her, if you are organized.
De Rivoire has built a company on it. Three years on, Kidstorie has a team of 15 and reached profitability in October 2025.
The butterfly effect
In Kidstorie’s early days, when the business was still running out of the basement of de Rivoire’s home, the IMD network was already helping to shape the company. The wife of one of her MBA classmates came to work with her. Her MBA mentor, Edoardo Tocco, CEO of Balenciaga in Asia, remained closely involved, mentored her and joined the board.
When an IMD entrepreneurship professor invited de Rivoire to speak about Kidstorie in front of EMBA cohorts, participants followed up with advice that shaped how the business evolved. One EMBA alumna she contacted on LinkedIn because of her skillset later joined Kidstorie for several months, before using that startup experience to secure a place on a PhD program in entrepreneurship.
Fundraising followed the same pattern. So did hires. Her current consulting work, taken on as Kidstorie has become more automated, arrived the same way. “Lots of butterfly effects, connecting the dots,” de Rivoire said.
“I have to say that people respond when you reach out to them,” she added.
The network that keeps giving
De Rivoire has become as much a contributor to the network as a beneficiary of it. She mentors MBA participants, returns to speak to cohorts, and connects people across the community.
For de Rivoire, that willingness to help each other is what gives the network its real value. “Especially those having done the MBA or EMBA,” she said, “because it’s such a transformative period of your life, and you’ve learned a lot, and you also want to give back.”
For de Rivoire, the measure of the MBA was never the year itself. It was what kept unfolding after: the conversations that resurfaced, the collaborations nobody scheduled, the question asked on an expedition that sparked the idea for a company.
That pattern is already coming full circle. After speaking about Kidstorie to an EMBA cohort, de Rivoire stayed in touch with one participant: a tech executive based in Zurich. They had talked about working together, but the timing was never right.
Two years later, he reached out again. When he made the journey from Zurich just for lunch, she knew he was serious. Today, the two are building a project related to education, a new AI venture focused on helping children learn, and love, mathematics.
Her advice to other alumni thinking about entrepreneurship is simple. “No limits,” she said. “Everything’s possible.”
