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Matthieu Ventelon (SKEMA 2016), founder of Hedonia
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Can you tell us about your academic background?
I was born in Tours but grew up in Toulouse. After high school, I entered a business school in Toulouse. In my second year of undergraduate studies, I was lucky enough to go on an academic exchange to Montreal for a year. I then returned to France to join SKEMA Business School's International Business Master's programme. After a semester at the Lille campus, I was keen to discover foreign campuses. The international dimension is one of the school's strong points and one of the reasons I chose it. [...]
During my Master 2 at SKEMA Business School, I specialised in Entrepreneurship & Innovation. As as I was still keen to explore Asia, I went to study for six months at the SKEMA campus in Suzhou, China, 100 kilometers from Shanghai.
At first glance, I wasn't too taken with the city. But I quickly made some great friends and had the opportunity to explore the old town: a truly charming area full of canals and narrow streets that have earned it the nickname of "Venice of the East". I've come to love Suzhou! It's also where I met my wife.
What was your career path after SKEMA Business School?
At the end of my semester in Suzhou, I decided to look for professional opportunities locally. I did an internship with BottlesXO, a wine importer specialising in home deliveries. At the time, I didn't know the wine world very well, but my father is a keen wine-lover, and, being from the Loire region, I was fairly familiar with it all the same.
I was in charge of the company's business development. In other words, my role was to sell wine to companies, restaurants and private individuals. At the same time, I did a course with the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust), the world's largest wine training organisation. I took Level 1 in Paris, then Level 2 in London. This benchmark training enabled me to develop an initial expertise in oenology.
How did Hedonia come into being?
When I worked at BottlesXO, I had to organise tasting workshops to sell the wine, during which I explained to a Chinese audience how to taste and serve wine. One day, an English teacher who worked at a school where I was running workshops asked me if I could also teach the French lifestyle and etiquette. This request came as a bit of a surprise, but as I knew the subject well because of my mother's upbringing, I decided to go for it! So I organised a 90-minute workshop explaining how to set a table, place the cutlery, behave at table, taste wine and so on.
As Chinese culture and behaviour at table are very different, this workshop aroused a great deal of interest, and I soon received a lot of requests to organise others. That's when I realised that here was an opportunity to be seized, so that's how my company Hedonia was created in in December 2018.
