From Le Wagon to spärck: a 100% female tech collective

We recently caught up with Vicky, Katell, Clémence, and Nour — four Le Wagon alumni who graduated in March 2020 — to talk about their new agency called spärck. After being a part of our very first female majority batch, they went on to launch a 100% female tech talent collective.

The women first met in January 2020 while completing the web development bootcamp at Le Wagon Montreal and became friends almost immediately. After graduating, they continued working together to further develop their skills and, quite naturally, the idea to undertake even bigger projects together soon took hold.

From left to right: Clémence, Aline, Vicky & Katell on Demo Day

What is the spärck collective?

spärck combines diverse skills to offer holistic solutions to web development. Because of our complementary backgrounds, we can support clients from idea to production and design to deployment, while offering the very best of ourselves on each project.

The collective currently includes as members Vicky, a teacher, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary designer; Clémence, a former professional athlete and UI/UX designer passionate about building web applications and emotional connections with users; Katell, a former marketer turned developer; and Nour, a developer and business strategist.

What motivated you to launch spärck?

We realized that we were each facing blockers while working on small projects individually, but by working on projects together, we could overcome difficulties and advance much quicker.

Given that our previous careers were in completely different fields from each other — athletics, marketing, design — we’re able to leverage that collectively diverse expertise to our advantage.

What does your agency bring to the Montreal tech ecosystem?

When we were students at Le Wagon, we were part of the first batch to have consisted of a majority of women, and that was extremely motivating and encouraging to us.

It’s in this spirit that we decided to work together and make our mark in web development. We wanted to create a work environment that respected our lifestyles and provided a balanced life.

How did your experience at Le Wagon help prepare you for entrepreneurship?

The first thing we learned at Le Wagon was how to work autonomously, which is an invaluable asset when it comes to entrepreneurship.

The bootcamp is very hands-on, and we mostly learned everything through completing daily coding challenges. We also experienced coding in teams, which taught us the power of teamwork in solving problems.

Near the end of the bootcamp, we dove into creating a full web app from A to Z, which was a huge learning experience. To build a project and to pitch it in public taught us to structure our ideas and synthesize our thoughts in order to present them to a wider audience.

Do you have an idea for a tech project but need the technical skills to pull it off? Join our next batch in Montreal starting in January 2021!