The twin tracks go back to the beginning. Born to a French father and American mother, Erik Lautier spent the bulk of his childhood in the U.S. “The accent certainly doesn't give it away, but I've got a French passport,” says the Partner in the Growth and Retail practices in a mildly Southern twang from his home office in Aix en Provence.
Erik’s education began at Duke University in North Carolina, where he got a Navy ROTC Scholarship but chose to study drama, soon realizing that the Navy wasn’t for him. “It is sort of symptomatic of me in life, doing two different things that seem completely contradictory in nature,” he says. “Who goes to school on a Navy ROTC scholarship while majoring in drama?”
He graduated early and auditioned for the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, which gave him a full-ride merit scholarship for two years and eventually led him to New York City. At that time, the tenor worked in Broadway productions, played both Gaston and the Beast at the Kennedy Center in D.C. in a touring “Beauty and the Beast” production, and had a recurring role on a daytime soap opera.
Having built his own website to promote his work as an actor, Erik was asked by other performers to help with theirs. He began consulting, and helped a TV star launch an e-commerce cosmetics line in 2000, before “influencing” was known as such. Demand for his services grew; by then, Erik was coding transactional websites from scratch, and he chose to “legitimize” his work in the business world through an MBA at INSEAD. Erik’s first job after graduation was helping U2’s Bono and wife Ali Hewson launch their clothing brand Edun online, which later attracted LVMH as an investor.
From there, he took on roles of increasing responsibility at Lacoste, Bebe, and Francesca’s, where he served as CMO, and subsequently opened his own retail and e-commerce consultancy. The track led to AlixPartners, first as a contractor, then full-time, which brings us back to a moment in his days as a singer that we rushed past.
“I've always followed what I was passionate about and trusted that if you leap, the net will appear.”
In 1993, Erik had picked up a French copy of Hamlet, curious to see how “to be or not to be” translated (“Être ou ne pas être?”—better in French?). As he read the line, a melody came to him, and “that melody haunted me for the next two decades.”
In 2015, he finally downloaded composition software to notate the melody, and the flood gates opened: an entire opera began pouring out. “My wife says I was channeling the universe, which I don't know if I believe in, but I can't disagree because I didn't have to think too much about it,” he says.
Though based in Texas at the time, Erik rented a recording studio in New York City, and hired some of the world’s greatest opera singers to sing the different roles, recording each individually and then combining them into a fully orchestrated two-hour-long opera. He completed the work just before COVID-19 shut the world down, which made a live performance all but impossible. The pandemic also accelerated his e-commerce work—there was never a better time to shop online from home—so Erik shelved plans to put Hamlet on stage and essentially forgot about it until years later at AlixPartners, when colleagues showed interest. “I stopped being so shy and hiding it,” he says, “realizing this is actually probably the most interesting thing about me.”
The key had been to follow that melody. “I've always followed what I was passionate about and trusted that if you leap, the net will appear.”
Hamlet may have spent the selfsame play in a spiritual limbo, always between two states, but Erik sees overlap in the different tracks he has taken throughout his career. Music led him to digital strategy, which led him back to a different expression of music: composition.
In the interim, he lived through retail’s great disruption.
“The technological revolution was happening in real time, and my role basically evolved from a designer/coder to somebody that that leads an e-commerce or a marketing function,” he explains.
If Erik’s path was the lesser-taken, he says the digressions add to his knowledge. “Music is just code,” he says. “It’s a set of instructions to an instrument that produces something we can experience; there’s a back end to it that’s all ones and zeroes, and a front end that elicits an emotional reaction. I see parallels between writing music and my e-commerce work, and I look at the latter the way I hear the former: attuned to what will move the audience and fixated on what needs to happen beneath the surface for it to achieve that end.”
He has since broadened beyond composition to pen the original book and lyrics for a new musical and feels that his role at AlixPartners offers fertile ground for creating.
“I think everybody here has something other than being a consultant that is really interesting about them,” he says, “and I feel like this is a place that that encourages that to come out, which is a huge advantage.”
