• Prologue · Berlaimont
• Leaving · 2013
• Hollywood · 2013-2017
• Dortmund · April 2017
• Building · May 2017
• The Turning Point · 2020
• Recognition · 2023
• Passing It On · 2026
• Epilogue · Today

From Berlaimont to Hollywood: a story of cinema, transmission and perseverance

The story of Marmignon Brothers was born from a contrast.

On one side, Berlaimont, a town in the Hauts-de-France region to which we are deeply attached. On the other, Los Angeles, its studios, its productions and a film industry looking out to the whole world.

Between the two, two brothers: Corentin and Clotaire Marmignon.

Our story does not begin in a training room. It begins with a shared passion for images, stories and projects capable of crossing borders.

Nor does it begin with a ready-made team, major investors or a network ready to open doors for us.

When we first imagined our project, we had no privileged access to the Hollywood studios, no address book in higher education, and no technical team available full time.

We had an idea, limited means, a great deal to learn, and the conviction that it was possible to bring two worlds closer that rarely spoke to each other: cinema and training.

Everything else had to be built.

Nothing was written in advance

Told today, our story might seem to follow a logical path. In reality, nothing was mapped out.

We did not come from a big start-up network, and we had neither a full technical team nor established relationships with studios or institutions. Nobody was expecting us.

We had to reach out, persuade, rework our proposal — and start again from scratch at every stage.

Los Angeles was not a network we inherited. It is a network we had to build.

We were aiming for Hollywood. We started by selling flamiches, one at a time.

Before Los Angeles, we had to fund the departure

Before we could discover the film industry in Los Angeles, we first had to be able to get back to the United States.

At the time, paying for the visa applications needed for our internships was already a major obstacle. We did not have the means to treat this departure as a mere formality.

Rather than give up, we looked for solutions on our own scale.

With a community centre, we organised various fundraising activities. We prepared meals and took part in sales of maroilles cheese flamiches (a savoury tart from Northern France) to gradually raise the money needed to pay for our visas.

The contrast may raise a smile today: we were aiming for Hollywood, and we sold flamiches one by one to get there.

Los Angeles was not the starting point of a journey that was already funded. It was made possible by a series of modest initiatives, and by a determination not to let a lack of means decide for us.

2013: the first foundations of the project

The story of Marmignon Brothers truly begins in 2013, several years before the company was officially founded.

Our time in the film industry in Los Angeles shows us the narrative power of cinema — and everything that lies behind the images: production, catalogues, rights holders, distribution.

A scene can convey a situation in a few seconds. It can carry an emotion and stay in memory for years.

If a scene could do that, why couldn’t it also help people learn a language? That question was going to change our course.

Understanding the other side of the audiovisual industry

Turning cinema into a teaching tool was not a matter of adding a few videos to an app.

We had to identify the right content, build relationships with rights holders and meet the security requirements of the audiovisual industry. Clotaire gradually develops this expertise in content acquisition and distribution.

This work establishes the first relationships with players in the industry — relationships that would become essential components of e-dutainment.

Another way to learn languages

Traditional learning helps you memorise rules and vocabulary. But you can know a grammar rule without ever managing to speak.

The problem was not the content being taught, but the absence of context. Films and series brought precisely what was missing: voices, emotions, real situations.

Entertainment became a starting point. Learning remained the destination. That intuition was to become e-dutainment.

A stop in Silicon Valley

Our journey in the United States also takes us to Silicon Valley, where we discover an ecosystem designed on a grand scale.

This experience allows us to develop a network that we have kept over time — and on which we rely today to offer learning expeditions to companies and institutions.

A conviction born from those first experiences: some skills are hard to pass on in a classroom. Sometimes you have to travel, observe, experiment.

April 2017: the night speaking English changed everything

We are AS Monaco supporters. In 2017, we follow their Champions League run all the way to Dortmund for the quarter-final against Borussia Dortmund.

On 11 April, a few hours before kick-off, three explosive devices detonate as the Borussia Dortmund team bus passes. The match is postponed to the following day.

In an atmosphere of anxiety, the supporters on site have to decide whether to hit the road again or look for somewhere to spend the night.

We are travelling as a group of six. We are the only two in the group who speak English — enough to explain our situation and get in touch with a German family who agrees to host us.

In circumstances as unusual as these, English stops being a school subject. It becomes a concrete ability to communicate, to adapt, to build a connection.

A few weeks before the creation of Marmignon Brothers, that night gives concrete meaning to our vision: learning a language means gaining enough ease to act when the situation demands it.

2017: turning an idea into a company

On 21 May 2017, Marmignon Brothers is officially founded.

The name goes back a few years earlier, to Los Angeles. Alongside Big Screen Entertainment, we were members of the American-Chinese CEO Society, where we worked with American and Asian executives on various events. In that international circle, “Corentin” and “Clotaire” proved hard to pronounce and remember — “Marmignon Brothers” came about more naturally.

The name also reflects our family bond and the way we work: challenging each other’s ideas, bringing together complementary skills and building together over the long term.

To get started, we obtain a bank loan of €50,000 — enough to fund the first version of the app, freelance developers and the first content acquisitions.

A limited budget set against the ambition of the project. We have to make choices, learn fast, move forward through successive versions.

Two brothers, complementary responsibilities

From the start, our responsibilities divide up naturally.

Clotaire leads the project, the technical development, and the acquisition and distribution of content. Corentin develops the educational side and the adaptation to different learner profiles. Sales and marketing, we run together.

We share the same vision, without always taking the same path to get there — a complementarity that becomes one of the foundations of Marmignon Brothers.

Learning to build everything

Our ambition is not to put videos online: we want to build a genuine learning method around cinema.

Without a large team, we have to bring together professions rarely combined in a single project:

• steering digital development;
• instructional design;
• content production and structuring;
• acquisition and distribution of audiovisual content;
• content security and relations with rights holders;
• user experience;
• sales;
• digital marketing and communication;
• professional training.

We develop, test, fix, start again. An innovation is never just a good idea — it has to work in the real world and evolve with users’ needs.

Higher education as our first testing ground

Alongside developing the app, we present our approach to higher education institutions.

Our first client is CFA IGS, which tests the solution from its first year. ICD Business School is also among the first to place its trust in us.

These collaborations are decisive: they confront our idea with real learners, with very different levels and needs.

Higher education becomes both a testing ground and a new professional space for us.

From platform to teaching

When school directors buy into our message, one question keeps coming back: would we be ready to work directly with their students?

Our project gradually leads us to teach. Our first sessions begin at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, in Valenciennes, and then expand to Élysées Marbeuf and the Université Catholique de Lille.

Over the years, this network reaches 64 schools and institutions.

This regular presence in the field feeds directly into our work: by teaching, we observe what works, what gets in the way, and what really helps a learner progress.

The birth of the e-dutainment method

The name e-dutainment combines two ideas: education and entertainment.

The method starts from a simple observation: we remember better what we understand in context. As it developed, e-dutainment became an environment bringing together, among other things:

• films, series and educational videos;
• activities adapted to CEFR levels;
• comprehension and grammar exercises;
• contextualised flashcards;
• dedicated pronunciation work;
• placement tests;
• progress tracking;
• support from trainers.

The experience offered by the app comes down, first of all, to three words:

Watch. Play. Progress.

Watch content that holds your attention. Play and interact with the learning activities. Progress through a structured pathway.

This promise carries over into our approach to professional training:

Contextual Immersion. Professional Fluency. Measurable Progress.

Contextual immersion. Fluency that can be put to use in a professional environment. Progress that the learner and the organisation can observe.

Technology enriches resources and personalises activities — but it does not replace the trainer, who spots a hesitation or a blockage that a platform cannot see.

Three financial years without pay

The first years of Marmignon Brothers are not yet an established commercial success.

During the first three financial years, we pay ourselves no salary — while continuing to steer development, acquire content and meet institutions.

The project moves forward, but it rests on our ability to hold out without knowing when the model will find its market.

This period teaches us that a company is not built on vision alone — sometimes you have to carry it for several years before you can live from it.

2020: when the market catches up with our vision

The first real commercial turning point comes in a context nobody had wished for: the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2020, school closures and the switch to remote teaching confront institutions with a major difficulty. Many do not yet have structured solutions to reproduce the quality of in-person teaching online.

Until then, we had to explain why digitalisation might become important. Suddenly, the question is no longer “why?” but “how?”.

Covid-19 did not create our vision. It abruptly revealed the need we had been working on since 2013.

After several years of developing, testing and explaining our approach, the market had just caught up with our vision.

An idea that eventually finds an echo

In the early years, most of the work happens far from the cameras. We have to develop the platform, structure the teaching approach, find the first partners.

Visibility comes later. M6, France 3, BFM Business, Europe 1, Challenges, Forbes and Les Échos Entrepreneurs feature our approach. In 2023, e-dutainment wins the Education category at the Trophées Europe 1 de l’Avenir.

These awards carry a particular meaning: a few years earlier, we did not have the network that could have made this path obvious.

But our story was not built on a single spectacular moment. It was built before the spotlights came on.

Discover our media appearances and awards

When our clients’ needs reshape our profession

By supporting companies and institutions, we come to understand that their needs go beyond learning English.

How do you train teams on new tools? How do you bring digital into the business without losing people along the way? Questions close to those we had to answer in order to build our own company.

The skills we acquired to grow our project can become useful to other organisations. Marmignon Brothers therefore gradually broadens its fields of work:

• generative artificial intelligence;
• digital transformation and strategy;
• digital marketing;
• search engine optimisation;
• website creation and optimisation;
• content production, acquisition and distribution;
• data analysis and automation;
• entrepreneurship and business development.

This evolution is not a break with our story. It is its continuation: a skill is acquired more durably when it is put into practice in a real context.

Passing on what our own journey has taught us

We know the reality of a project that starts with a limited budget and no network already in place.

This experience directly shapes the way we support companies: we start from their real situation, not from an ideal solution.

Our role is to make the next step understandable and achievable — not to impose a spectacular transformation.

Technology is never enough

Our journey has taught us to be wary of an appealing idea: that a tool could, on its own, solve a problem.

A high-performing platform does not guarantee learning. The difference is made in how it is used.

That is why our programmes combine technology, teaching expertise and human support — we help participants work out what they can really do with it.

Berlaimont as our anchor

After Los Angeles, Marmignon Brothers could have settled in a major city. We chose Berlaimont, in the Hauts-de-France.

It is our anchor, the place from which we develop projects for learners and companies sometimes located thousands of kilometres away.

Our journey today connects worlds that seemed far apart: Berlaimont and Hollywood, cinema and artificial intelligence.

We never chose between our roots and our international ambition. We built Marmignon Brothers on the meeting of the two.

From experiment to a structured training organisation

As our work grows, Marmignon Brothers also has to become more structured — creativity does not replace the rigour needed for quality support.

Qualiopi certification places this organisation within a formal continuous-improvement framework.

Behind every course, we look for the same balance: a rigorous framework and an experience lively enough to make people want to see it through.

2026: a new step with France Num

In 2026, Marmignon Brothers is listed as a France Num Activator (Activateur France Num) — a national network of professionals supporting very small businesses and SMEs in their digital transformation.

Our official profile presents our expertise in artificial intelligence, digital strategy, search engine optimisation and business development.

This listing confirms our place in that network: having built our own tools with limited resources, we can now support other organisations in their own transformation.

Discover our official France Num Activator profile

What has never changed

Since 2013, our project has evolved profoundly: a first intuition became a company, a network of 64 schools, then an activity focused on artificial intelligence and digital strategy.

And yet the essentials have not changed.

We believe a skill must be usable in a real situation.

We believe technology should simplify work rather than add complexity to it.

We believe human support remains indispensable to understand needs, remove blockages and build confidence.

And we believe that innovation is measured not by the number of tools used, but by the progress it genuinely makes possible.

The Marmignon Brothers adventure started from an idea, a €50,000 loan and a team that could not yet devote itself to it full time — with no investors and no pre-established network.

The first contacts became partners. The first experiments became a method, then a platform.

Our journey does not prove that a good idea is enough. It shows that it can become a lasting project when it is backed by hard work and the will to keep going when nothing is yet certain.

It all started with a movie scene. One question guided us: could we learn differently? Today, it has widened: how do we help everyone use the skills they will need tomorrow?

This is the story we are still writing.