From the moment the receivership was announced on 5 March 2025, Daan adopts a two-faced communication strategy: forced transparency before the court, where it admits its strategic mistakes, but emotional and often misleading public communication that plays down how serious its situation is.

In its email to shareholders, the company highlights “2024 revenue of €6.7M, up 3% on 2023”, but says nothing about the net result: a telling silence when you know the loss was -€1.6M in 2023. According to my information, and although the 2024 accounts have not been closed, the losses are said to be roughly the same.

On its website, Daan rolls out a highly emotional communication strategy with its “IN FRANCE, WE MAKE THINGS” campaign. The opening message, “Without you, Bob throws in the sponge!”, sets a dramatic tone from the outset, favouring patriotic feeling over rational analysis.

This communication contains several strategic omissions:

• No explicit mention of the receivership, simply referred to as a “critical situation”;
• The situation is framed as a “fight against the system”, a financial system supposedly hostile to French industry;
• An exaggerated social impact, with “200 jobs” at stake when the company employs only around forty people.

But one detail particularly caught my eye: there is talk of “crowdfunding”. Digging deeper, it’s hard to find the slightest call to action, and the whole thing looks very vague. Especially as there’s no shortage of contradictions in the pitch:

• The company claims that “the development of Joe, our multi-function oven, is finished”, while admitting it needs €2.7M just for the industrial tooling;
• The pre-order scheme for Joe at just €1 reveals a desperate strategy: “We need 5,000 pre-orders to fund the last stage of industrialisation”;
• The company says it needs to sell 6,000 Bob units to help fund Joe, without saying whether those sales currently generate enough margin.

Comment under a LinkedIn post by Antoine Fichet

But what isn’t clearly said is that, in reality, having failed for 2 years to bring in other professional investors, Daan wants to do… another raise of at least €500K from its community.

And frankly: that’s serious.

Having failed to convince institutional investors, who are better at spotting the real weaknesses of its business model, Daan is deliberately (once again) shifting the risk of its rescue onto less well-informed retail investors. By going back to individuals for a second bridge in 8 months, without the SLIGHTEST guarantee, Daan is playing Russian roulette with more than €1M from non-professional investors.

Because:

• Even if the €500K were raised, the company wouldn’t be saved;
• And even if the full €5M came in, it still wouldn’t save a company that loses more than €1.5M a year and has to refinance several million euros of debt within 2 years.

All this to invest in a company where Antoine Fichet, through his holding company La Réunion SAS, keeps absolute control with 52.74% of the capital, making the power of the new retail investors being courted purely symbolic.

All this when it would have made sense to run this sales-boosting campaign a year ago…

This gap between upbeat communication to the general public and the official diagnosis given to the court could also raise questions of legal liability, particularly given the transparency required when raising funds from the public. The obligations to provide clear, accurate and non-misleading information seem to be undermined here by this double-speak strategy.

Because what comes next, which should be settled this May, is far from guaranteeing a happy ending.

• If the amount gets close to €5M, the company will ask for the observation period to be extended, while it waits to have a clearly viable plan;
• If the amount falls well short, which looks the most likely outcome (unless a saviour who has never shown up in 4 years suddenly appears), then the company will look for a buyer or end up liquidated.

Among the people who might be interested, or who are M&A experts, all tell me there’s little chance of a takeover. The courts will want to save jobs, the company isn’t profitable, so even for a takeover at a symbolic one euro, you’d need €2 to 3M to relaunch the business at the very least. All for a brand that never really took off, isn’t widely known by the general public… and now has plenty of competitors, notably Chinese ones.

A court-appointed administrator, used to this kind of case, told me the most likely outcome is that the stock will be sold off by the bank Crédit Agricole, which holds security over it, and that everything will end up in a discount outlet, like the furniture of the online retailer Made in its day.