French Insider Podcast Ep. 44, Pt. 1
From Leveraged Finance to Founder: Building, Scaling and Reinventing a Brand with Nicolas Nemeth
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Listen to the podcast released July 8, 2026, here: https://www.sheppard.com/insights/podcasts/french-insider-episode-44-pt-1-from-leveraged-finance-to-founder-building-scaling-and-reinventing-a-brand-with-nicolas-nemeth
In the first of this two-part episode of French Insider, host Karl Buhler is joined by Nicolas Nemeth, founder and CEO of Bonne et Filou, the French-inspired luxury “lifestyle” brand for dogs, and co-founder of Dumbo Health, a health tech startup focused on sleep apnea diagnosis and treatment. They discuss Nicolas’ journey building a distinctive consumer brand from the ground up, the realities of bootstrapping and scaling a niche luxury business, the lessons learned from banking, and what it takes to pivot a company toward sustainability and growth.
About Nicolas Nemeth
Nicolas Nemeth is the co-founder of Dumbo Health, a digital sleep clinic that allows patients to skip the sleep lab and bring the entire obstructive sleep apnea journey home, and founder & CEO of Bonne et Filou, the first French-inspired luxury “lifestyle” brand for pets in the United States focused on delivering high-quality, luxury and innovative products in the pet industry.
Nico began his career as an investment banker in LBO and M&A with seven years of previous experience in New York City. He closed dozens of transactions worth a total of $5.0+ billion in secured financing, with a focus on healthcare and consumer deals. He is fluent in English and French, with international experience gained in NYC, Boston, Paris and Melbourne.
About Karl Buhler
As an associate with the Corporate and Securities practice group and French Desk in Sheppard’s New York office, Karl Buhler focuses his practice on domestic and cross-border transactions, including mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and complex commercial agreements in industries such as technology, communications, life sciences, energy, defense and aerospace. In particular, he advises foreign companies with the installation and development of their operations in the United States.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Welcome et bienvenue à French Insider, the Sheppard French Desk monthly podcast dedicated to French investors and companies investing and doing business in the United States. Each episode features conversations with thought leaders and experts in various industries on the business environment and challenges of investing and successfully growing in the U.S. And now, for the inside look.
Karl Buhler:
Hello, everyone. My name is Karl Buhler, and I’m an associate at Sheppard in New York. Today, I am thrilled to welcome Nicolas Nemeth, founder of Bonne et Filou, the macaron brand for dogs, and co-founder and CEO of Dumbo Health, a health tech startup focused on diagnosing and treating sleep apnea. Welcome, Nicolas.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Hi, Karl. Thank you so much for having me.
Karl Buhler:
We are pleased to have you today. You have had a very exciting journey over the past 10-plus years in the U.S., and we’d like to know more about what you did, where you came from and what you are doing now.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Yeah, of course. I’m happy to introduce myself. I love that two French people are speaking English for the audience.
Karl Buhler:
Exactly. Exactly.
Nicolas Nemeth:
So I’m originally French, as you can hear from my accent. I always try to get rid of it, but it never worked, probably like you did as well.
I moved to the U.S. in 2011. I did my master’s in Boston, and then I moved to New York for my first job. I was an intern at BNP Paribas in the leveraged finance group, so I was doing LBOs, financing and basically private equity acquisitions. We looked at all industries, but I had a pretty big focus in healthcare and consumer goods, which happen to be the two fields I actually moved into as an entrepreneur, so it was a great fit.
Karl Buhler:
Okay. And how long did you stay there?
Nicolas Nemeth:
I did a bit more than six years. I basically reached the VP stage, and I remember it was actually three months before what probably would have been my largest bonus, which I’ll never know. I passed on a promotion, and I basically left to create my first company. I tried to do both, working as an investment banker and creating a company on the side, and it wasn’t really meant to work. Nobody really wants to have a phone call at 6:00 a.m. after you’re done with your night on Sundays when you’re trying to build a company, so at some point I had to make a choice.
Karl Buhler:
Okay. Okay. And so, I guess that brings us to the next topic. The first company that you created right after quitting your banking job, can you tell us a little bit more about it?
Nicolas Nemeth:
Yeah. And I think the most interesting part of my journey is coming back to that side and seeing why I did so. As a teenager, I founded my first company, which was kind of unofficial, doing import/export and reselling a bunch of things to my friends when I was in high school, so I always had that kind of entrepreneurial mindset. But then, as a student trying to find an internship or your first job, my mindset was more, “Okay, how can I be mistreated for the first five years of my career?” And so that doesn’t leave you a lot of choices. You go into consulting, you go into M&A, you go into leveraged finance. You go into any of those jobs where you basically work 100 hours a week and learn a bunch of new skills, and so that’s exactly what I did. I did an internship in M&A before that, and then leveraged finance, so I was that guy who wanted to go into that job with a focus on spending three years learning skills and then basically going to create my first company, since I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I think I had that vision or stereotype in the past that any of my friends who started a company after business school didn’t really know what they were doing, and I didn’t want to be that guy. I wanted to go to a good school to learn, per se, and those big banks or consulting firms are usually the way to go. And then, at some point, you forget why you went in the first place, and we call it the “golden jail,” right? You get the salary, you get the bonus. You have so much work that you don’t have time to look at anything else. And so I became that guy who had so many ideas and was telling his ideas to everybody—his clients, his friends, his colleagues—and then being that guy who would never launch anything because he was stuck as a banker in his comfort zone.
And so I remember I financed a deal for a T-shirt apparel company where a guy probably cashed out for a billion dollars. I had dinner as a junior with him, and I was telling him two of the ideas I had. He stopped me in the middle of my second idea and said, “Oh, Nico, there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. There are the ones who talk about it their whole life and never take the risk, and there are the ones who actually execute it, take the risk and go for it. Which one are you going to be?” And that night, I remember I came back home and I was like, “I’m a loser. I would stay in banking my whole life.” Not that people who stay in banking their whole life are losers, but in my journey, it was not what I wanted to do.
So I started doing a little bit of business on the side, and somebody offered me the chance to purchase a company in France that was doing cupcakes for dogs, a very interesting company that is definitely a niche, no pun intended, and it was relatively small. Obviously, I wanted to do something in the U.S., and I was like, “What if I do the same concept, but French, in the U.S.?” And so the market for dog treats in France at that time, in 2018, was like $100 million, and in the U.S. it was $8 billion, so the whole market was completely different. I had done two pet deals at that time, so I knew the market pretty well. And so I started building that company on the side, and that’s how I got into it.
Karl Buhler:
Okay. And so you quit your job and go full-time as an entrepreneur, right? That is in 2018.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Yep, and it’s part of the learnings now. It was probably the way it was, what, eight years ago? At the time, how am I going to phrase that? You come out of those jobs, where you work with probably the most intelligent people on the planet, or all those ideas people and people using their brains every day, and your clients are smart and everybody’s smart. And then you go into the real world, where I’m not going to hire the top people with bootstrap money. And so, as one of those guys, and I think especially with probably a French mentality thing too, you have a feeling you know things better than other people, and so you think you can probably do so much more. I used to work 100, 120 hours a week, sleep two hours a night. And I’ve been taught in an industry that tells you not to sleep because sleep is for losers, because you’re not going to be at your office and you should be at the office. And so you start going with that mindset, being like, “Okay, I can do five jobs in one.”
And so, while I was thinking that all my friends who went directly into entrepreneurship after business school had no skills to do so, they were probably the ones who actually learned the hard way what to do and what not to do, and I had to learn it the hard way myself. But entrepreneurship at the beginning is amazing. You do your thing. You make your decisions. There are so many advantages. Your go-to-market is yourself. You’re the only one deciding, and nobody is there to question any of that. And then, at some point, when the first issues occur, it’s not fun anymore. It’s very lonely. Entrepreneurship is about solving a hundred issues a day, and it becomes a mindset, but at some point it feels very lonely. And so that’s more my personal life, but I was married at the time. I got married toward the end of my banking career, and then switching into entrepreneurship was kind of hard. I was working as much as before, if not more, and I completely cut my social life, but there was no more salary coming in.
So my priorities became different, and I think I definitely made that switch a little too harshly. You’re by yourself. You want to go as fast as you can, you want to grow as fast as you can, and you have the pressure of your own capital being invested and of investors coming in when you do, so it’s a lot of pressure for one man and one team. And so my biggest mistake, I would say, was thinking I could do most of it by myself and not surrounding myself with the best. As I go through my entrepreneurship journey and do multiple ventures, I now understand that an entrepreneur is somebody who is average in everything, but is capable of doing a little bit of everything. But a good entrepreneur versus a bad entrepreneur is your capacity to surround yourself with the best in each category. And that’s really what I was lacking on my first venture, Bonne et Filou, where I did everything by myself because I didn’t have the financial means to hire anyone who was actually brilliant in their field. So in that matter, it was kind of learning by failing, in a way.
Karl Buhler:
Were you able to use the skills that you learned as a banker when you became a sole entrepreneur? Or actually, looking backward 10 years ago, was there really nothing that you were able to transfer except maybe your ability to work a lot overnight, on weekends, et cetera?
Nicolas Nemeth:
No, I think that’s probably what I’m most grateful for, my banking experience, especially leveraged finance. There are jobs where you are really exposed to corporate finance, so you really take a company inside and out, like everything. It’s not only financial or a financial model. It’s contracts. It’s legal terms. It’s how a company is run from inside and out, so it’s really having that understanding of how a company works. I wonder every day what my experience would have been if I never had that banking experience before, and it probably would have been very different. I think banking teaches you skills that are key in everyday life and in managing a business, and it’s a very good question. I’m not really sure I would have been able to do it if I didn’t have that experience before.
I think there is also a question of being book smart and a question of being street smart. Entrepreneurs who don’t have this kind of experience are more street smart, and they will make it work at all costs, even if they are not technical enough. Entrepreneurs who come from that world are almost overly smart for their own good, and they’re going to think too much before taking a decision and want it to be too perfect. I’ve noticed all of those things. I mean, now I notice that I made those mistakes in my first venture—not that I’m too smart. That’s not what I’m trying to say.
I’m just saying that, especially as a banker, you want things to be perfect before launching them. I remember at the time I didn’t want to launch my company because the website was not perfect. The go-to-market strategy was not perfect. There was always something that was not perfect, and you always delay something, when the real way to test is to test and learn. You launch something, you pivot, you test it to see if it works, and you improve it as it goes. Nothing is perfect when you launch it.
So yeah, no. I mean, I’m very grateful for the experience I had. I think it’s having good skills at both, at being educated in a way of technical skills, but also street smart enough to be able to take those bold decisions and not have to always go back on them and overthink them. And I see some people today who are trying to become entrepreneurs from those kinds of jobs who are just not fit for it because they almost overthink too much, right?
Karl Buhler:
I see. And so, focusing on Bonne et Filou a bit more, you learned the concept from an existing company in France. You decided to launch a U.S. equivalent here. How did it go?
Nicolas Nemeth:
So basically, the goal was to become a Ladurée for dogs. We started with a main product that was like macarons for dogs, and I knew that it was going to be ... I mean, my French friends obviously thought that I had gone crazy and that something had gone completely wrong in my mind. The Americans were a little bit different because Americans understand what marketing is. Surprisingly, the first six months were very hard, because when you launch a company, you almost expect sales to come over time. It’s like you press that button, you launch the website, you launch everything, and it’s almost like in a movie, “Oh, look at all the sales.” I remember having no sales for three weeks, and I was freaking out, and I started doing trade shows. I won one of the prizes at one of the trade shows, and retail stores came to see me, and so it’s just a question of go-to-market. It’s test and learn, things that can work or not.
And the good thing about the product category we had was that it was very unique, unique enough that the press wanted to talk about it. Anything that is unique, anything that is crazy, almost stupid, people want to talk about it. So we started having so much press around that company that makes macarons for dogs: treat your dog like royalty, dogs at the same level as humans in the U.S., so it was the perfect crowd. I did a few TV shows. I even went to Shark Tank, one of the best experiences in my life.
Karl Buhler:
Okay. So you went on Shark Tank, on TV, and you had a lot of press. I remember, because I have to disclose to the audience that I’m also a customer of Bonne et Filou for my dog. Yes, yes, yes.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Great, love!
Karl Buhler:
Yeah, of course.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Thank you for being a favorite customer.
Karl Buhler:
Of course, of course. For years now.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Thank you to your dog.
Karl Buhler:
Actually, the first time I spoke to you is because you were doing some kind of sales point in Bryant Park, but ...
Nicolas Nemeth:
No, we don’t do it anymore. Yeah, I had a phase where we started, so we started going heavily into retail. That was working better than e-comm because, for us, we have a very similar business model to Fauchon or Ladurée. For the French people who listen to us, they will know the category. It’s basically a category that is very premium, where your products are almost too premium for their own category. So it’s dog treats that are expensive. At the end of the day, you buy six macarons for $24, but it comes in beautiful packaging. It’s all about the experience. They’re healthy.
Karl Buhler:
The packaging actually was very soft, had a very premium feel.
Nicolas Nemeth:
Very premium-feeling, yeah. So you become that product that is expensive for its category, and automatically, it becomes almost a gift. And so it becomes very seasonal. We ended up having 80% of our sales happen during the holidays. So now we are, of course, making seasonality something. Every month we are celebrating something new, whether it’s Mother’s Day, Pet Day. It could be any reason to sell, right? So it’s hard because you get in that category, very seasonal, very gift-oriented. And at the same time, you’re not selling a Chanel bag, so you’re not selling a product that is $5,000. You don’t have enough budget, and the price tag is not high enough to be able to acquire customers digitally through digital ads at a profitable rate. So you end up in between those two zones, where it’s very hard to become profitable and scale at the same time, and that’s really where I hit a wall.
At the peak of the company, we were at Petco. We were in a thousand retail stores, not our own stores. The only stores we had were those popup stores that you were mentioning, Bryant Park and the World Trade Center. We had those little popups during the holidays, so it was working really well. And so we tried, at some point, to turn the company into more of a one-stop shop, like a French-inspired luxury one-stop shop. But for that, it’s obviously creating a bunch of new products, new product lines, and you need a little bit of capital, so I started raising money in 2022. I’m very grateful for everybody who backed me up. It was mainly business angels. I never could convince one VC of Bonne et Filou’s potential scalability, which today I kind of understand. I bootstrapped most of it with my own money. I put probably like a million dollars into the company, so it was one of my biggest mistakes as well as an entrepreneur. Mostly, you cannot raise funds and leverage capital from somewhere other than yours, but I’m happy I went through the mistakes.
And so we could never really turn it into that one-stop shop because of the lack of budget. So in 2023, I took a 180-degree turn and basically made the company lighter in terms of cash burn, and I turned the company into profitability. I had to cut a few channels, a few distribution channels that were not profitable. At the time, it was growth at all costs, and it became more like, “Okay, how can we become profitable?”
And today we have five people on the team. They’re mainly… purely operational people. They are great at following things to do, but they are not great at taking decisions and growing the company. So I would say the company is more sustaining itself than growing massively, but we serve luxury clients. We are at luxury hotels. We have the Plaza in New York, the Four Seasons. We’re in private jets. We’re at a bunch of different stores. We serve the private treats, the private-label treats, for Hermès, Cartier, Lanvin, all the luxury brands. So when you come into a store of a luxury brand, they give you a Bonne et Filou treat or a private-label treat. Most of the time, we do them.
I mean, we have great branding. We have a brand that is known, but I never really could scale it to the $50 million or $100 million as I wanted. And so, at some point, it really becomes your opportunity cost. It was, what, five years since I launched Bonne et Filou in 2023, and I was like, “Okay, well, if I can’t really grow that brand to where I want, what do I do next? Do I go back into banking?” Well, now you have a five-year gap in your resume in a way, so there’s no way you can go back to what you were doing because you ...
Karl Buhler:
Well, I wouldn’t call it a gap, right?
Nicolas Nemeth:
Well, I think if I had to go back to my boss and be like, “Hey, can I come back?” they would be like, “Okay, but you come back as an associate or a VP.” And I’m like, “Well, I would have been MD by that time.” “Well, you don’t know the market anymore.” So obviously, I could go into VC, could go into a lot of different things, but that’s not really what I wanted to do. I think, especially as a human being too, entrepreneurship really changed me. It made me become way more modest, way more down to earth. As a banker, you make good money, you’re around smart people. You become almost a little bit cocky. Not everybody, but that’s kind of what I was at the time. And today I’m so much more grounded, and I much prefer the person I am and all the learnings that I had in that world.
So I really wanted to stay an entrepreneur, for sure, and I had a bunch of ideas. The issue was that I hadn’t made a dime in terms of salary in the last five years, so I needed to find an income. I started looking at all the VCs that do entrepreneur-in-residence programs, where basically you go develop ideas for the VC, you launch the ideas, but they pay you and they also fund the company. I ran a few ideas that I had through a bunch of those VCs. At some point, I started working for six months in a row on a fintech idea that I had. I’m a huge fan of credit-card points and cash back with credit cards, so I worked on a tech around that. And at the same time, that’s when my current co-founder came to see me because he had sleep apnea.
And so, somewhat on my personal journey as well, I had a bunch of fertility issues that were linked to my health habits, if I can say that this way. In my mind, especially in your 20s, you think you’re invincible and you can do anything, and so sleeping two hours a night becomes a habit. You just do that the whole time until you crash, and you probably crash once a month, where you are sick and you need to sleep for two days in a row. I became kind of like a biohacker on the side. As a very analytical person, I was really refusing to accept that my body could fail me without understanding why. And so I started becoming that ultra-analytic guy around his health, wearing all the wearables, like an Oura Ring, Apple Watch, WHOOP, wearing a glucose monitor, and really seeing every single little thing I was doing. Whether it was going to the gym, eating a pancake, getting anything, I was just seeing what impact it had on my glucose curve. I was going every two months to do a bunch of blood panels and trying to understand how to fix it.
And a lot of it was about sleep, where I happened to discover that sleeping two hours a night is not good. They teach you that in the books, and you believe that it’s for other people, but it’s also for any human being. And so I started trying to fix my sleep. At that time, my co-founder, Mo, who has sleep apnea, was very frustrated with his own patient journey, which was very painful and remains very painful in the U.S. I looked into that market and accepted to join him to create the Hims for sleep apnea, and that’s what we’re working on today.
Speaker 1:
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