“The offer has not been accepted to date. » This was the response of a Club Med representative in Switzerland to the AWP press agency on January 23, following the information of Echoes according to which the family group Maus Frères proposed to the conglomerate Fosun to take a majority stake in the company. The Chinese owner and the Swiss group, which owns the Lacoste and The Kooples brands, are “still under discussion”added the spokesperson, knowing that “other offers” are currently under review.
“Contacted by AWP, Maus Frères did not respond to our requests”, specified the Swiss financial press agency. To be more precise, she could have added that the silent family holding company never responds, contenting itself with rare press releases to discuss changes in general management and in the various companies controlled by the family, or rather by the families.
Because among the Maus and the Nordmanns, we have kept to ourselves since 1902, the date of the establishment of a partnership between Léon Nordmann, a retailer by trade, and his friends Ernest and Henri Maus, themselves owners of a retail business. import-export of hosiery in the bilingual town of Bienne, canton of Bern. One hundred and twenty-two years later, the company’s website, with a sobriety reminiscent of the prehistory of the Internet, still states that “The statutes of Maus Frères SA require that the president, as well as certain members of the board, come from the Maus and Nordmann families. Strict selection criteria and procedures guarantee appointments based on competence”.
No fuss
Chairman of the board of directors and main face of the family’s fourth generation in business, Didier Maus, 67, rarely appears in public, except sometimes when he lunches without fuss at the Manora restaurant in the Manor department store in Geneva, among the customers and employees. It is barely rumored that he was ” disaster “about fifteen years ago, upon discovering that the bimonthly magazine Balance sheet had included the Maus clan in its first list of the “300 richest” in Switzerland. At the end of 2022, the family would be worth between 3 and 4 billion Swiss francs (between 3.2 and 4.3 billion euros). The group, which is not listed, does not publish any figures.
According to a former executive, cited by the French-speaking economic review PME Magazine, Maus Frères, whose head office is officially in Basel, in the canton of Basel-City, is today managed mainly from Paris, where the CEO, Thierry Guibert, who is also general director of Lacoste, has his office. In 2020, the latter declared, in an extremely rare interview at Financial Times, that the Maus family had commissioned him to expand activities with fashion brands. In fact, the ” cut ” the most famous was the acquisition in 2012 of Lacoste polo shirts, in a portfolio which still includes the French brands Aigle (boots, shoes, ready-to-wear), The Kooples and Tecnifibre (sports equipment) as well as the Swedish Glove.
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