# About > From transactional digital to relational digital. The founders of UNQ, where we come from, and the technology and partners the platform relies on. **From transactional digital to relational digital.** E-commerce has industrialised selling, not advice. The showroom offers expertise, but to too few customers. UNQ brings the two together: the exclusivity of showroom advice, at the scale of digital. Every customer deserves an advisor. *We build your customer relationships.* Two-axis matrix: scale on the horizontal axis, quality of advice on the vertical axis. Six groups of alternatives are placed on it. - **Showrooms and in-store salespeople**: the best advice, at the smallest scale. The best advice: you touch the materials, you sit down, a salesperson knows the product and the customer. It only reaches those who walk through the door, during opening hours. Examples: your showrooms, your stores, your retailers. - **Human remote advice**: high-quality advice, at a small scale. Video consultations, video appointments, live shopping: a real advisor, live, with no travel. The quality is there, but each exchange takes up one person’s time, during their working hours. Examples: Bambuser, giosg (formerly Whisbi), Tulip. - **Customer service and e-commerce chatbots**: large scale, low to medium advice. They answer frequent questions quickly and at scale: delivery, returns, order tracking. Designed first for customer service, they are less suited to a considered purchase that takes several weeks to decide. Examples: Gorgias, Tidio, Zendesk, Intercom. - **E-commerce website alone**: very large scale, low advice. Open day and night, to all customers at once: filters, search, product pages. But no one asks the customer what they are really looking for. Examples: websites built on Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop or WooCommerce. - **General-purpose AI assistants**: maximum scale, medium advice. They can converse and compare, for the whole web. But they only know your catalogue through what is published about it, they do not speak in your voice, they do not hand over to your salespeople and they do not manage the relationship on your behalf. Examples: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. - **UNQ**: large scale and high-quality advice, without reaching the scale of a general-purpose assistant or the quality of a showroom salesperson. An AI advisor that knows your catalogue and speaks in your voice, hands over to your salespeople for an appointment and follows the customer over time. It does not replace the showroom: it brings the customer there. ## 30 years of industry expertise. 20 years of tech and AI. ### Catherine Colin — Co-founder, CEO 30 years immersed in high-end design and interiors. She founded Made in Design in 1999, a pioneer of design e-commerce, and sold it in 2019 to Groupe Printemps after making it the European leader. She knows this market intimately: its brands, its professionals and above all its customers. She received the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award in 2011. ### Rémi Alvado — Co-founder, CTPO 20 years designing and growing tech products, from Kelkoo to start-ups; he designs the UNQ platform and its AI. ## Where we come from ### 25 years — From digital to advice Twenty-five years in e-commerce and interiors forged a conviction: **the “one-to-many” relationship is no longer enough.** A website can receive millions of visitors without really knowing them: **95% leave without being identified or supported.** At Made in Design, Catherine had already begun to evolve the model by building, beyond digital, **teams dedicated to advice, especially for professionals**, to offer more personalised support. **This evolution was already answering a deep expectation of customers: to be advised and supported, beyond the mere transaction.** ### AI — Changing scale Customer expectations keep evolving: **they want more advice, more personalisation and more service, online included.** Then it clicks for Catherine: with AI, what used to require dedicated teams can now be offered **to every customer, at scale.** ### Late 2025 — The meeting Catherine meets Rémi through the Grenoble start-up ecosystem. Convinced that AI will transform entire industries, and drawn to e-commerce since his time at Kelkoo, another success story, he embraces the vision and joins Catherine. UNQ is born. ### Sept. 2026 — UNQ opens its doors UNQ opens its platform to **furniture, decoration and home** brands. **A new generation of digital: more relational, more personalised, designed to advise, serve and support every customer.** ## Technology and partners - **Zelinqa** : NBQ (Next Best Question), a patented technology under exclusive licence from Zelinqa, of which UNQ is the first partner. - **LIG / CNRS / UGA** : Research collaboration with the LIG (CNRS / UGA). - **Bpifrance / France 2030** : Bpifrance Deep Tech programme (France 2030).