In 2025 she finished fourth out of 85 sales professionals worldwide. She was managing a $3 million book of accounts, signing more than $800,000 in new business a year, and doing it while tariffs slowed the market around her. In June 2026 she walked away from all of it. The number she checks first now has nothing to do with revenue.
The Co-Founder Who Measures a Room by Who Comes Back
Lauriane Blanc is the Co-Founder of Women Abroad Club, a New York based media platform and community for women building lives outside the countries they were born in. She spent six years selling into a market that was not originally hers, and became very good at it. What those years actually taught her was not only how to close a deal, but how to make someone want to stay.
Bordeaux to Berkeley, and a Long Education in Arriving Somewhere New
She studied foreign languages and international business at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, then spent a summer at the U.S. Consulate in Bordeaux handling commercial and cultural affairs. In 2016 she left France for the first time, for a semester of business administration at Berkeley’s Haas School. She went back for a master’s at KEDGE Business School and a year at Mondelez International in Paris. Then, in 2020, she made the move permanent.
Her first New York role was with Business France, where she advised more than 30 French food and beverage companies trying to enter the American market. She ran their market research, shaped their positioning, and built a network of over 100 industry contacts. She also watched a lot of good products fail.
“Success in one country does not automatically translate into another.”
European companies arrived with excellent products and underestimated how saturated American shelves already were, or how much they would need to spend to earn a moment of attention. Lauriane was, at the time, doing the same thing herself in a different form. She was a Frenchwoman learning to sell in a business culture with different rules about directness, follow-up, and trust.
At Parcome Paris she found out how far that translation could go. She joined as an Account and Project Manager in 2022, was promoted to Senior in 2024, and became Associate Director of Client and Project Management in early 2026. Along the way she took a $1.5 million portfolio to $3 million, held an 81% client retention rate, managed 30 or more live projects at once, and generated roughly a fifth of the New York office’s revenue. Packaging work is technical and unforgiving, and deadlines there are not negotiable.
“Business is ultimately very human. People work with people they trust.”
That conviction is what makes the rest of her record legible. The retention rate and the new business figures were not two separate skills. They were the same one, applied to people who had decided she was reliable. She also names her manager as part of the reason it worked, someone who challenged her and set a standard she has since adopted as her own.
What 70% Looks Like on a Tuesday Night in New York
Women Abroad Club started as something she and her co-founder built on the side, for a problem they had lived through. Millions of women relocate every year and arrive isolated, without the network that makes a new city survivable. It is now a growing platform with in-person events in New York and Paris, a podcast Lauriane hosts, a newsletter, a resource library, and increasingly expert-led programming.
The choice to build for women specifically was deliberate. Moving abroad leaves people exposed, and a women-centered room makes it easier to admit that out loud.
“The metric I care about most is loyalty, not simply reach.”
At a typical Women Abroad Club event, roughly 70% of the room has been there before. The other 30% are new. In a city offering an infinite number of better-marketed things to do on any given evening, that ratio is the hardest number in the business to fake, and Lauriane treats it as the only real proof of whether the thing works.
The outcomes she points to are not the ones on the event page. Two members who met through the community later took a trip together. Another found a professional opportunity through someone she met at an event. These are not results anyone can promise in advance, and Lauriane does not pretend otherwise.
“We cannot manufacture friendship, confidence or opportunity, but we can create the environment where they are much more likely to happen.”
That is a narrower claim than most community founders make, and a more defensible one. The organization is not selling belongings. It is building the conditions under which belonging tends to occur, then measuring, honestly, how many women come back to test it again.
“Sometimes the impact is tangible, like finding a job or a new friend.”
And sometimes, she says, it is a woman who walks in nervous and leaves two hours later feeling less alone than when she arrived. Lauriane counts that too.
The Same Question, Asked in a Different Room
The thing worth noticing about Lauriane Blanc’s record is that nothing about it actually reversed. At Parcome, 81% of clients renewed. At the Women Abroad Club, 70% of the room returns. She has been asking the same question her entire career, first of packaging buyers and now of women who moved to a city where they knew no one: did this matter enough that you would come back for it?
The revenue figures were never the point. They were the receipts.
The metric never changed, only the room it is measured in.
Lauriane Blanc is the Co-Founder of Women Abroad Club, a media platform and community based in New York City. She and her team support women moving, living, and working abroad through events, partnerships, content, and the Women Abroad Club podcast. To connect with Lauriane or learn more, visit her LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/lauriane-blanc.
