Culture is future » Innovation and digital

CULTURAL START-UP OF THE WEEK: Le Chapeau à Plume

Next-up on our online cultural entrepreneur series, the Forum d’Avignon would like to introduce: Le Chapeau à Plume develops children adventure-tours in heritage sites, under the form of digital applications or illustrated booklets.

 What is your company’s objective?

Le Chapeau à Plume develops adventure-tours for children in heritage sites. These ludo-educative tours are adventures to be experienced in situ, by families or for a school trip.

Our tours can be followed in a completely autonomous way, with the help of the chosen tool: either a digital application for tablet or smartphone, or a nice illustrated booklet.

We aim to develop this type of tours everywhere in France and abroad.

We are convinced that guiding the young generations towards the discovery and understanding of the treasures that surround them will make them passionate adults for tomorrow!

We started from an obvious fact: children get easily bored during a cultural outing, in spite of the numerous tools dedicated to them… They are enthusiastic in the beginning, then they quickly disconnect… So to catch their attention from the beginning to the end of the visit, what is better than telling them a story, with a plot full of unexpected developments? 

We have imagined two “collections” of tours, like for children books: The little Detectives, a collection of investigation-tours adapted to well-delimited sites, full of hidden corners (town districts, castles, museums…), and The Gardeners of Time, a collection of adventure-tours dedicated to historical parks & gardens, that take the form of a journey through time.

Each collection has its own heroes and plot canvas, but we develop a new story for each site. This way, children can find with pleasure their heroes in various heritage sites, each time a new tour is released.

What challenges do you face in your development?

We have launched a first children tour in Versailles in March 2015, in the Little Detectives collection, and are preparing the release of new tours for Spring 2016. But we are still actively looking for private or public orders from sites interested in our tours, and also for funding solutions to support our development.

We are also developing a range of various ways to use our tours:  school trips - with pedagogical sessions to be done in the classroom that complement the tour - as well as corporate events. Parents and children live the adventure together, our tours can be an excellent idea for a corporate Christmas event!

What does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur?

For us, to be a cultural entrepreneur means using today’s tools – especially digital and interactive devices – to make culture accessible to all. It means offering a high-quality product and service, both in form and substance: to arouse children’s curiosity towards heritage sites’ beauty, the tools themselves need to be beautiful, and children must take an active part in their visit!

We are also particularly cautious about the fact that our tours are conceived with a return-on-investment objective for every participating site: the sites or sponsoring partners help to finance the tours’ development, but then they share with us the commercial benefits. This win-win system is for us a key element in today’s cultural sector.

France Martin-Monier (scenariste) et Gaëlle de Gastines (illustrator)

Credit photo Sophie Géhin

Follow Le Chapeau à Plume on…website, facebook

The web series : we’re interviewing cultural start-ups – Contact us!

As part of its web series on cultural entrepreneurship, the Forum d’Avignon is proud to present each week exciting stories on cultural start-ups.

This project is part of the Forum d’Avignon’s on-going work, in line with its 2015 agenda, on the ‘hybridization of economic models in cultural and on the manifesto on cultural entrepreneurship in creative industries (to be published soon).

To participate and promote your cultural start-up on the Forum d’Avignon’s website: please send to the address forum-avignon.org@orange.fr:

• A photo (website/founders/logo) in HD
• A video link presenting your project
• A short answer (2-3 lines, in English and French) to the following three questions:

                        - What is your project/idea/start-up?

                        - What is your current challenge?

                        - For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur