Why are we doing what we do?
Our mission is to deliver a highly qualitative Digital User Experience to our customers and their users.
We strive to work in a dynamic and fun environment where honesty, proactivity and creativity are celebrated.
We are not afraid to fail as long as we seize these opportunities to grow as a company and as humans.
Our Culture
Quality
We want to deliver highly qualitative projects and work in an agile way. the truth of the day is that of the day! Remember: Less is More.
Customer-centric
We are here to challenge, solve customers problems and provide adapted solutions bringing the highest value to the end-users.
The sky is the limit!
We hate routine. We are not scared by thinking outside of the box, being curious and creative. Nothing is impossible!
Ownership & autonomy
We value proactivity, polyvalence, collaboration and follow common goals. “No Excuse”: communicating more is always better than not enough.
No Bullshit
We value honesty, openness and to tell the truth. With our employees, partners and customers. In a respectful way.
FUN
Life is too short to get bored, Let’s have some fun and learn. We also want to be proud of our work!
The Story
Coteries’ journey started in Summer 2012. After spending 4.5 years in a technology park in Northwestern Switzerland as a startup scout, mentor and coach, Sébastien Flury and Sébastien von Roth gathered to launch a new startup in the digital space.
As social media addicts, we’ve observed that Facebook was growing rapidly, but the organic reach of fan pages was decreasing. Simply said, social media managers were growing the size of their fan page, but in the same time, the algorithms of Facebook were hiding more and more the publications to people liking their page. We wanted to offer a solution to this growing problem, and especially in the music space, which was our preferred industry, where we were able to provide both knowledge and the most value.
We brainstormed and after some iterations, we came to the conclusion that a “Mobile Fan Club” would be the solution. Facebook pages would continue to be important for getting massive awareness, growing the “fans” base and being able to have vanity metrics (getting millions of likes on your fan page but no engagement of your fans – what is the value of these paid likes?).
We told musicians: “Grow your fan page, but then engage with your real fans in your mobile fan club. Make them be part of your club, which you own 100%. Provide in advance to your real fans exclusive content, like music, lyrics, videos, pictures or news. Get to know them better (also simply by knowing who they are) and monetize all the valuable work you’re spending so much time producing!”
Early on, we’ve approached a rising super star, from our own region… Bastian Baker. Bastian and his manager Raphaël were rapidly convinced by our proposition and we worked hard together to release Bastian Baker mobile application at Montreux Jazz Festival in July 2013, a revolutionary mobile application in the music space. Of course, some musicians at this time had tried something in the mobile space, but never before, you were able to have such a close interaction with your preferred music star.
We founded our company, Coteries, officially in December 2012. But what does this strange “Coteries” word mean, you may think? Coterie is a word in old English and old French meaning an exclusive group of people sharing a common interest. A fan club being a group of people sharing a common passion, we’ve chosen this uncommon word to express what we were building!
Soon after launching the mobile application of Bastian Baker, we met Swiss music legend Henri Dès and some international music superstars, like INNA or Boy George, as well as fashion blogger Xenia Tchoumitcheva, for instance. Sébastien was travelling all across Europe to meet stars and their manager, from London to Berlin, from Amsterdam to Ibiza. Alongside, we’ve adapted our mobile app solution to be fitting indie musicians. We’ve finally launched half a dozen mobile apps in 2014.
End of 2014, however, we realised that as well as our solution was loved by the fans, musicians were not that ready to invest enough time and efforts to engage more deeply and directly with their fans. And that despite all of our efforts and passion, our solution was not sufficient to make the company develops and flourish.
As we had always been working alongside our startup product as a digital agency, defining User Experiences, designing and building websites, web and mobile applications for other startups or big corporates, we decided to pivot. We decided to focus on marketing and developing this unknown visage of Coteries. We were providing high quality design and development services, without telling it openly!
That’s what we are today: a Switzerland-based digital agency designing, developing and marketing highly qualitative digital products… Whatever your needs, we probably have the solution for you!
As startup entrepreneurs passionate by designing and building products, we also made the decision to have a 80/20 philosophy, inspired by Google: 80% of our time working for customers, 20% working for our own products. Out of this 20%, we’ve tested and launched several products, as our group travel mobile app Planify, Bookable, ParkShare, GoTeam!, the local producers directory Local Heroes and more recently the AI for text generation Cedille.