Olivier Van Themsche

Founder and CEO Cools

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Olivier Van Themsche is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cools, a New York-based curated online marketplace for fashion and lifestyle brands. The company came from a problem he experienced personally rather than from market analysis: living in Paris, he repeatedly found that his most stylish friends wore labels he had never heard of — brands that were well known in one country but had no distribution in France, so that discovering and buying them meant travelling to London, New York or Tokyo. Cools was built to collapse that geography into a single platform, giving consumers one place to discover brands with limited international distribution and giving those brands, many of which had no e-commerce operation of their own, a direct route to customers. The platform’s defining characteristic has been curation rather than scale: it reportedly turned away around nine in ten brands that applied. A French entrepreneur who moved to New York in 2009, Van Themsche had already founded two unrelated businesses — an electronic music label and a video game development studio — before starting the company.

Career Highlights

• Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cools, a curated fashion and lifestyle marketplace based in New York.
• Built the platform around heavy curation, reportedly declining roughly 90 percent of brands that applied.
• Grew the roster to around 300 selected brands, with a reported 50 to 100 more joining each month during the platform’s growth phase.
• Repositioned the business from a general marketplace for independent sellers, brands and retailers into a direct-to-consumer sales channel for young brands without their own e-commerce.
• Founded an electronic music label and a video game development studio before Cools.
• Moved from Paris to New York in 2009 to build the business.

Professional Journey

Van Themsche was born and raised in Paris and began his working life outside fashion entirely, founding an electronic music label and then a video game development studio. Neither venture is documented by name in available sources, but both are consistent with the pattern of his later work: consumer-facing businesses built around taste, discovery and community rather than around logistics or supply.

He moved to New York in 2009. The idea for Cools came from his Paris years, where he had noticed that the brands his friends wore were frequently undiscoverable in France — well established in their home markets but with no distribution locally, so that finding them required travel. His observation was that the obstacle was distribution and discovery rather than demand, and that a single curated platform could solve both at once.

Cools launched in the early 2010s, though sources disagree on the precise date. Business of Fashion places its initial launch in June 2011 as a marketplace for independent sellers, brands and retailers, while Van Themsche himself has described an official launch in June 2012 as a closed members-only platform, with the site opening to the public on 11 April 2013. The members-only start is telling about the model: the platform was positioned from the outset as a social commerce environment, in which users followed community members and tastemakers and discovered products through them, with brands running their own shop pages and interacting with consumers directly.

The business subsequently narrowed its focus. Rather than serving independent sellers, brands and retailers generally, it concentrated on young brands that lacked an e-commerce presence of their own, for which Cools functioned as a direct-to-consumer channel. Curation remained the central discipline — the platform reportedly rejected around 90 percent of applicants — with the brand roster reaching roughly 300 and growing by 50 to 100 per month at its peak reported rate.

Public information about the company thins out considerably after this period, and its own website was unreachable when checked in September 2026. Van Themsche’s current involvement and the company’s current trading status could not be confirmed from any source consulted.

Education

No education details were found in any available source, including trade interviews, Business of Fashion coverage, Crunchbase and The Org. This field is deliberately left empty rather than inferred.