Charlotte Cadé is the cofounder of Selency, a second-hand furniture and home decor marketplace launched in 2014. The project was born from a personal need: furnishing her first apartment with unique, meaningful pieces. This pleasure of thrifting turned into a company, then into a collective adventure. Today, Selency brings together more than one million visitors per month, 5,000 partner merchants, and around thirty employees.
Over eleven years, Charlotte has raised funds several times, recruited and evolved her team, and navigated a restructuring — without ever giving in to the temptation of playing a role. Alongside her husband, Maxime Brousse, she has built an ambitious yet sincere company where human culture has never been a communication tactic, but a true framework for making decisions and moving the organization forward.
Entrepreneurship is above all a human adventure
“I think entrepreneurship is made of human adventures. When I would meet clients, talents, prospects, I approached them with sincerity — and that allowed me to rally people around me.”
From the beginning, Charlotte relied on human connection to move forward. Without budget or reputation, she succeeded in rallying others by clearly outlining the ambition of the project and the value it could create. The way she articulated where she wanted to go — and what it required — quickly gave clarity to those who joined.
Key takeaways:
- Sincerity creates natural attraction: when a project is carried with authenticity, it inspires people to join even without promises of comfort or visibility.
- Early hires set the cultural tone: the values embodied by the first employees — their mindset, their way of working — become the company’s long-term cultural blueprint.
Hiring with authenticity and clear judgment
“A CEO is not expected to know every job in their company, but they are expected to ask the right questions to make sure they hire the right people.”
Charlotte embraces not knowing everything. For her, hiring is first about understanding what drives someone — why they want to build here rather than elsewhere. By asking the right questions, she evaluates motivation, curiosity, and a desire to learn, more than pure technical mastery.
The best hires were often those able to simplify, connect their craft to the business, and work in complementarity. Humility, curiosity, and clarity of intention became her best indicators of human fit.
Key takeaways:
- A leader’s role is to question, not to master every skill: they don’t need to be an expert in every field, but they must ask the right questions, observe how a candidate thinks, and understand what motivates them.
- The ability to simplify is a decisive indicator: true experts can explain their subject clearly. Technical skill only has value if it can be shared, understood, and connected to a readable business need.
- Human alignment matters more than technical perfection: someone who understands the mission and shares the company’s values will have more long-term impact than a technically perfect but misaligned profile.
Growing without betraying the culture
“Selency’s strength has been staying very loyal to its original culture. We have a very strong culture internally, with former employees telling us they’ve never found anything like it elsewhere.”
Between 2015 and 2022, Selency raised several rounds of funding to support growth. The arrival of well-known investors brought credibility and visibility, making hiring easier and accelerating development. But despite these new resources, the original culture — ambition, authenticity, resourcefulness — remained unchanged.
Charlotte always made sure to preserve this spirit, even during expansion. The team continued to “make do with what they had”: by keeping a taste for the concrete and a sense of balance, Selency grew without losing itself.
Key takeaways:
- Company culture must be actively protected: the bigger the organization, the easier it is to drift. Keeping the culture alive requires constant vigilance from leadership.
- Constraint shapes identity: working with limited resources forces creativity, clarity, and prioritization — qualities that forge a strong and distinctive culture.
- Growth shouldn’t override coherence: keeping the same tone, ways of acting, and reference points — even after raising funds — is the best way to build a credible and lasting brand.
Leading through difficult times — the employment protection plan
“Decisions must be rational. You need to ask what minimum resources are needed for the company to operate and survive. You reason in terms of roles, not people.”
It’s in crises that company values are truly tested. During the employment protection plan, Charlotte chose not to hide behind silence or numbers. She opted for transparency: explaining the cash situation, sharing constraints, detailing the trade-offs. The decision — rational but painful — was taken with lucidity and carried out with humanity.
For Charlotte, leading also means facing complexity without disconnecting from emotion. A leader’s role is not to shield teams from reality, but to give them the keys to understand and navigate it with dignity. She therefore favored open dialogue, leaving space for conversation and listening. This posture — demanding but sincere — helped preserve trust even in a moment of rupture.
Key takeaways:
- Transparency makes hard decisions more legitimate: sharing data, constraints, and logic allows teams to accept reality even when it’s difficult.
- Pedagogy is a form of respect: explaining choices and giving meaning recognizes employees’ maturity and right to understand.
- Emotion strengthens leadership: acknowledging the human weight of decisions, showing empathy without giving up firmness, embodies a leadership that is both lucid and credible.