This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with entrepreneur Dagobert Renouf, 36, who lives in Lille, France, and now works in tech sales at the startup Comp AI. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I was an entrepreneur for seven years, bootstrapping businesses. That means not getting any funding. I had some good moments and some struggles. Over the summer, I launched a solo startup, and it wasn’t going very well. I was running out of money.
Almost two years ago, I met my now wife. She’s Russian and I live in France. We wanted to live together. Because of visa issues, we wanted to accelerate the wedding. I could absolutely not afford any kind of wedding because of the business situation, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give up on either dream — of building my startup or on the wedding.
I have a community on social media talking about my journey as an entrepreneur. So I posted something like, “I have to find a way to pay for my wedding. No idea how I’m going to do it.”
I said the minimum wedding I can do is going to be 4,000 euros. A friend of mine who’s a famous entrepreneur in our community said, “I’m going to loan you the 4,000, but you don’t have to pay me back if you can’t. I just want to support you.” Then somebody joked, “If you really need help for your wedding, you just put my logo on your suit.” Because it’s an entrepreneur community, everybody wants to promote themselves. That’s what we do.
After all these years in business, I’m like, “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. You try crazy shit if you want to make it.” So I said, “Let’s do it.” I posted on X, and then dozens of people were like, “Yeah, I want to put my logo on your suit.”
How my fiancée felt
When I told my fiancée, she hated it. All she saw was the reaction on X — people joking, making fun of it. What made her come around, and what was making this whole thing beautiful, was when I really connected it to the fact that it was a way to bring my community to our wedding. She said, “OK, we can do it, but only if it’s nice companies that you love, mostly indie companies — people you know.”
I had to convince people that she loved it. So, it became way harder than I thought to sell it. On average, I sold spots on my suit for 300 euros. I ended up selling about 10,000 euros’ worth.
Courtesy of Dagobert Renouf
Once I started doing the suit, then I’m like, “OK, now I want it to look good. I don’t want to look like an idiot.” I have a friend who’s a stylist — a very talented guy, but very expensive. He was like, “It’s going to be like 5,000 euros, but I can do this.”
We had the final list of logos at the end of August, and the wedding was in October. At first, he wanted to print everything on the suit, but that takes more time because you need prototypes. So we ended up having to do embroidery. The suit is high quality and very beautiful. When you look at it in person, it doesn’t look like a joke. Our family and friends loved it.
The fun thing is, out of the 26 entrepreneurs who supported it, I know almost all of them. A lot of them told me something like, “Just keep the money, but don’t put it on your suit. I just want to support you.” It was like a wedding gift between entrepreneurs.
I was like, “No, I want to do the suit. We love it.”
Landing a new job
It’s the most basic thing that we hear all the time as entrepreneurs: At first, they think you’re crazy, and then it seems obvious. For the first time as an entrepreneur, I had this experience.
I really had to fight for this. It took months of me posting on social media about it. Every time, half of the people were like, “This is so bad. This is disgusting.” I feel like sometimes I was the only one to see the beauty. That’s because, for me, entrepreneurship is my life. There’s nothing on the suit I don’t like. I can almost see the face of every founder associated with their company.
I wanted to do right by all the people who supported me. They helped me get to where I’m at now. Because I felt like I owed them something, I was actually quite stressed — more stressed than my wife — during the wedding because I was always like, “I need to make sure these logos are visible.”
I joked with a friend who was beating himself up because he missed putting his logo on the suit, “Don’t worry, you can have dibs on the baby crib.” My wife wasn’t on board with that.
One of the people who replied to my posts about the suit was the cofounder of Comp AI. We were only acquaintances, but he kept replying to my posts, saying to put his company’s logo on my suit.
At the same time, I realized that I can do sales, and he said, “Let’s get you a sales job.” That was completely unexpected. I was an entrepreneur for years, and I couldn’t see any other way of living. Without the suit, I would have never gotten this job.
Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.
