Corinne Vigreux | |
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Vigreux at Whatnext event in 2015
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Born |
Corinne Danièle Vigreux 9 December 1964 (age 52) Lyon, France |
Residence | Netherlands NL |
Alma mater | ESSEC Business School (attended) |
Occupation | Co-Founder and Board Member |
Years active | 1986–present |
Known for | Co-Founder of TomTom |
Title | Co-Founder of TomTom and Managing Director of its consumer business |
Spouse(s) | Marriage Harold Goddijn |
Children | 2 |
Corinne Danièle Goddijn-Vigreux, commonly known as Corinne Vigreux, (born 9 December 1964) is a French business executive and entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of the Dutch consumer electronics company TomTom where she has been Managing Director of the Consumer Business Unit since 2008.
Born in Lyon, France in 1964, Vigreux was brought up in the working-class suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin where her father was a commercial buyer for a chemical company and her mother, a pharmacy dispenser. After specializing in physics and maths at school (Lycée du Parc), she studied at the ESSEC Business School in Paris where she graduated in international business in 1987.
In 1987, Vigreux started working in London for the Psion consumer electronics company where she managed exports, travelling to North Africa, Israel and around Europe. While working at Psion, she met Harold Goddijn who was interested in distributing the company's products in the Netherlands. They married in 1991 and moved to the Netherlands where for a few months she worked for a dairy cooperative while her husband worked for Psion. Attracted back to technology, Vigreux teamed up with two of Goddijn's friends, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen, and founded Palmtop Software which later became TomTom.
Initially Palmtop produced products for popular handheld devices but by the early 2000s, Vigreux and her colleagues realized there were opportunities for producing dedicated mapping devices after Bill Clinton opened up the military GPS system for generalized access. The TomTom, the first stand-alone navigating device, with its own touchscreen facility, was released in March 2004. The market exploded over the next four years with revenues increasing from €42 million to €1.8 billion. In 2008, Vigreux was appointed managing director, sales director and chief commercial officer for TomTom, positions she still holds.