A house for learning, sharing and inventing, out in the countryside. Deep know-how, rare energy, but foundations that hadn't kept up with the growth. We didn't redo a website. We straightened out the structure first, then made it visible.
The client
Le LAB is a non-profit learning and cultural centre, at the heart of the Valromey and the Bugey, backed by an educational association rooted in the area for some thirty years.
Three strands: languages, culture, digital. Three formats: group classes, one-to-one lessons, workshops and short courses.
What makes it singular: offering deep in the countryside what is usually reserved for big cities. And having grown it fast, from a small after-school activity into a real offer for the wider public.
The starting point
An offer growing fast is good news. It's also a delicate moment: the tools you started with stop keeping up.
At the start, Le LAB was running on the means of an organisation far smaller than the one it had become. In practice:
- sign-ups that were hard to track, and real class sizes nobody really knew;
- an offer and prices seen as tangled, hard for the public to read;
- teachers on the front line of admin work that wasn't their job;
- a team swallowed up by repetitive tasks, at the expense of everything else.
The verdict, laid out from the diagnosis onwards: shouting loudly on fragile foundations was building on sand. Pulling crowds towards a sign-up funnel that jams turns good news into frustration.
True first, visible second. A restaurateur whose sauce disappoints doesn't have a communication problem. We started with the sauce.
The stance
The initial request sounded like “redo our website”. Our answer was more honest, and more demanding.
You don't put a new body on a tired engine. You rebuild the engine first.
Before a single line of communication, we rebuilt the base: the tool that runs the organisation, and the organisation around it. Because a gorgeous website sitting on a wobbly operation doesn't last six months.
That's the thread running through the whole project: foundations first, shop window second. Less spectacular to pitch at the start. Infinitely more solid at the finish.
What we left out
A good recipe is also about what you decide not to put in it.
We didn't start the identity from scratch. The existing logo was hard to use digitally, and the easy temptation would have been to bin the lot. We chose to take what was already there and simplify it, keeping what people recognised and finally making it legible everywhere. Respecting the memory of a thirty-year-old organisation counts.
We didn't take a closed platform. Wix, a Shopify, an off-the-shelf management tool: faster to set up, but you're the one bending to the tool. And Le LAB's offer (one-to-one lessons, pro rata, quotas, memberships) fits no standard box. We built bespoke so the tool would wrap around the work, not the other way round.
We didn't communicate straight away. Even though that's exactly what we'd been asked for. We owned the choice of making the visible part wait, so the invisible one could be secured first.
The recipe
01. We listen, on the ground. (January–February) A run of interviews with the team, the teachers and the users, to understand how things really worked: not on paper, in daily life. A numbers-backed audit of the first session. Then a framing note built on three pillars: radically simplify the offer, unify the sign-up journey, make the activity legible for everyone.
02. We rebuild the engine. Rebuilding the management tool and the organisation before any outbound communication. The base, before the façade.
03. We stay on site. On site every week (Thursdays, often Fridays too). Staying close to the people teaching, producing content, supporting the change over time. Not a remote engagement: a presence.
04. We build with people. An evening presentation to the teachers, in-depth one-to-one interviews, feedback wired straight into the tool. The people who use it every day shaped what we shipped.
05. We test for real. The summer programme served as a full-scale test, site and tool proven in the wild, before the step up at the start of term.
What we built
The identity, clarified and made usable
A sharp positioning and a strapline, “Le LAB: a house for learning, sharing and inventing”, that anchors the place and its three pillars. A dedicated domain name, lelab-bugey.fr, to give Le LAB visibility of its own and weight in local search. A brand guide taken from what existed, then simplified for web, social and print. And a single point of contact (dedicated addresses and phone line).
Labolo, the companion
Over the course of the project, the mascot became far more than a logo: a character, the thread running through the whole identity. Labolo guides users through sign-up, carries a playful, gamified world, and puts a human face on learning. He takes the sting out of what, elsewhere, intimidates.
An offer you can finally read
One clear public price, in place of a pile of formulas. A “Club Lab” membership that unlocks discounts on every course, a real loyalty lever. “Packs” for one-to-one lessons. And an “Entreprise” offer on quote, with its own page, born out of a first B2B collaboration in the area.
The “Bureau du Lab”, the bespoke management platform
The technical heart of the project: a tool that centralises the whole business logic. Courses, teachers, venues, terms, sign-ups, memberships, payments, invoicing: all in one place.
- A guided online sign-up in 7 steps, with ergonomics borrowed from the big consumer standards, designed for an audience that's sometimes older, facing an offer that's sometimes complex.
- Passwordless login (magic links + one-time code), with automatic role detection: student, teacher or admin.
- Dedicated personal spaces: student side (profile, invoices, courses, attendance, membership); teacher side (register, attendance, sheet exports, contact details for their students).
- Online payment, working: payment links, pay on site, staggered automatic reminders, refunds and credit notes generated on their own.
- PDF invoices and credit notes generated automatically, in the organisation's colours.
- Multi-participant sign-up: a parent enrols their children, a manager enrols their group.
- A real-time dashboard: numbers and activity by theme, town, teacher, age bracket, over the year or any period you like.
- An editorial AI assistant built into the admin to help the team write and translate (descriptions, SEO, FR → EN), and take a big weight off.
The public site, built to be found
SEO-optimised landing pages, at the crossroads of three axes: themes × areas × user profiles. Enough to catch very precise searches (for example: “English classes for seniors in Belley”). Public teacher profiles, bilingual, that put each of them forward. A dynamic FAQ per course, built for search engines and AI-assisted queries. A “course unavailable” alert that tells visitors the moment a slot opens and suggests alternatives, instead of an empty page. And a testimonial system to build social proof.
Communication and social: a strategy, not posts
A strategy built over 6 months, tuned to Le LAB's natural high points: the start of term and of each quarter for courses, the holidays for workshops. With one principle: fairness between campaigns, to push the whole catalogue forward little by little, not just the courses that were already popular.
In practice: a TikTok opened for teenagers, a proper Facebook page created with the audience migrated over, a local Instagram presence. Content tailored per network rather than copy-pasted everywhere. Teachers speaking up on video, people at the centre. Literary meet-ups streamed live. A newsletter launched with its own editorial line. And traditional local communication rethought in the new identity, Labolo top of the bill.
Compliance and solidity, under the bonnet
Groundwork for Qualiopi certification (mandatory pages, dedicated fields, internal audit), a key step towards making some offers CPF-eligible down the line. A full code review before going live. And a modern infrastructure: automated deployment, hosting we control, data that stays Le LAB's. GDPR as a value, not a checkbox.
Under the bonnet: the stack
Everything is built bespoke, on infrastructure we control end to end. The structuring choice: 100% bespoke rather than a closed platform, so the tool wraps around the business processes (one-to-one lessons, pro rata, quotas, memberships): total control, and no limits set in advance.
- Backend: Django (Python), robust and secure.
- Public frontend: native Django templates, dressed in Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI, with Alpine.js and HTMX for reactivity.
- Payment: Mollie (card, Apple Pay).
- Async tasks & e-mails: Celery + Redis.
- PDF generation: WeasyPrint.
- Passwordless login: django-sesame.
- Privacy-friendly analytics: Umami.
- Interactive maps: Leaflet.
- Reliability: over 1,600 automated tests replayed on every update.
The result
The site and the platform have been live since 16 June 2026. And the first month already said plenty.
- Over 100 sign-ups in less than a month after launch.
- Over 2,000 unique visitors on the site in one month.
- A new audience reached, beyond the organisation's historic circle.
- Business and institutional leads arriving straight through the site.
- 5 newsletter campaigns already sent.
But the real result isn't a traffic figure. It's a change in nature:
- an organisation that finally knows its numbers and its activity in real time;
- an offer you can read, where prices used to look opaque;
- teachers freed from admin, back to teaching;
- a team released from repetitive tasks by automation;
- a healthy base to communicate from: clear identity, findable site, analytics in place;
- an organisation ready to scale: coverage across the area, a business offer, CPF eligibility in its sights.
The best “before/after” of this project: we went from an organisation chasing its own admin to one that's properly equipped, calm, and ready to grow.
And now, we open the taps
That's the whole point of starting with the engine. The sign-up funnel converts: we can finally push people into it without turning the crowd into frustration. So the social campaign started after going live, not before. That was the plan from day one.
- Over 36 posts published in the first month.
- An Instagram audience up by more than 30%.
We know what works, and precisely
The tracking we set up doesn't say “the campaign went well”. It says which post, which campaign, which medium produced a sign-up. Offline included: flyers and the other local materials are tracked too.
That changes the nature of the work. We make the content, we measure what it produces, we adjust, and the next campaign starts with what we learned from the last one. Less effort for more result, every iteration.
What we're seeing already
One lesson that cuts against the grain: engagement is low, and yet the posts convert. Few thumbs up, sign-ups all the same, mostly from Facebook and Instagram. That's exactly why we measure sign-ups rather than likes.
TikTok is off to a slower start. We're sticking with it.
What this says about the way we work
- We fix the engine before the bodywork. No shop window on fragile foundations.
- Bespoke, for real. A tool that wraps around the work, never work bent to fit a template.
- A real presence, on the ground, every week, not an engagement floating above it all.
- We build with you, not instead of you, and not far from you.
- We steer by the data and correct live, even after launch.
- One single point of contact for diagnosis, organisation, tech, identity, communication and compliance. An ecosystem, not a jigsaw.
What comes next
Le LAB's story isn't over: the attached School, coverage across the area and CPF eligibility are already under way. An ecosystem is something you keep alive.
A project that sounds like yours? Let's find out if we're made for each other.