Beatrice Cociani is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of ER Ocean Recherche, an innovative start-up led by renowned French artist and designer Eugène Riconneaus, which manufactures sustainable fabrics from marine biomass. The company’s plastic-free, eco-friendly materials are helping push the carbon-intensive fashion industry towards sustainability.
We caught up with Beatrice at the ChangeNOW summit in Paris this April, where ER Ocean Recherche was exhibiting. Beatrice was excited to be there: “I love ChangeNOW. The iconic location, the chance to meet investors, clients, partners, people to hire, people with other ideas and solutions. It's amazing to be here.”
Beatrice has had a busy few years since she arrived in Fontainebleau in January 2023. Before INSEAD, Beatrice built a successful career in consultancy. But she had a nagging sense that she wasn’t learning much and could be doing something else with her time. Initially, she considered an MBA to help her move client-side. And, she says, INSEAD – with its international ethos, great programme, and one-year MBA – was an obvious choice.
In fact, the change Beatrice had been looking for in an MBA arrived more swiftly than she’d expected. “I arrived at INSEAD expecting to go into insurance. Within a week I’d changed my mind and decided to work in fashion, which had always been a passion for me.” And then, a stroke of luck: just a few weeks into the MBA, Beatrice saw Eugène Riconnaeus’s job advert for a co-founder at ER Ocean Recherche.
Eugène was looking for someone with real business credentials as a co-founder for his sustainable fashion startup. For both of them, it was a great business match. “Like Eugène, I have always had a passion for ocean conservation and sustainability. And at the same time, I’ve always been interested in fashion. ER Ocean Recherche puts it all together.”
Beatrice joined Eugène full time in January 2024. Since then, ER Ocean Recherche has been a real success story. In just over two years, they’ve grown from a team of two to six. They work with 29 partners, in Portugal, Italy and France, producing cotton, wool and silk blends with their signature algae-based SeiFibre™. They already have a production capacity of 510,000 linear metres per year, have had photoshoots at the Grand Palais in Paris, and are beginning to scale.
Beatrice says that her INSEAD experience helps her every day. The skills in business have been invaluable to her as COO, she says, but also, crucially, has INSEAD’s international quality. “INSEAD is truly international and diverse. During my MBA, I studied in Fontainebleau and Singapore, worked on a project in Germany, and did the Wharton Exchange. But diversity is also in the teaching: every course had cases from different continents. I lived in a house with eight other people, each one from a different country. As a result, I’m so much more at ease working in an international setting today. INSEAD has been an invaluable asset,” she says.
Certainly, Beatrice has found the change she was looking for when she came to INSEAD. “Every day, I'm doing something different and learning something new,” she says. And her role is highly rewarding. “It’s a wonderful industry,” she explains. “Yes, we are doing business, selling fabrics, but there is also so much art and beauty that goes into it.”
