It is an old rehabilitated soap factory, a few meters from the Old Port, in Marseille, which is topped by the inscription “Sessun Alma”. Pottery and ceramics have been alongside lamps, candlesticks, books and a twenty-four place restaurant space for four years. Just a few meters away, clothes with an offbeat style, signed by the Marseille ready-to-wear brand Sessùn… Identical approach for the clothing brand Sézane, with Sézane Maison, which recently joined forces with artisanal companies like Beldy , Vanity Boum or La Soufflerie, to offer an original offer, far from “fast decor”, a cousin of fast fashion: velvet cushions, blown vases with imperfect shapes… Customers are there.
Another brand, Ba&sh, tested a similar approach by setting up for a few weeks in 2021, Casa Ba&sh, a chic and bohemian pop-up boutique, at Bon Marché in Paris. The experiment seems, here too, to have been conclusive. The company is studying the launch of an identical but long-lasting decoration range which could come to fruition in 2024 or 2025.
” The brand Ba&sh was created intelligently, with a real concept and values, and is a driving force in the second hand sector”, explains Yann Rivoallan, president of the French Women’s Ready-to-Wear Federation. Ba&sh achieved a turnover of 320 million euros in 2022 and is targeting 500 million euros in sales in 2025. For its part, very discreet about its financial results, the French nugget Sézane, which has skillfully managed to grow its online community, generated a turnover of 250 million euros in 2021. In September 2022, the brand announced the arrival among its shareholders of Téthys Invest, the investment holding company of the Bettencourt Meyers family, heiress from the L’Oréal cosmetics group.
Created in 1996, Sessùn has reached a more modest turnover, of 45 million euros in 2022, and has frankly displayed its fashion-decoration positioning since an establishment in Madrid, the first in Spain, in 2020. “Since the crisis, we need real motivation from customers so that they come to the store (…). We really need to consider this development, and our thinking around the uniqueness of points of sale has taken on its full meaning with the emergence of Covid-19”declared the founder of Sessùn, Emma François, at the beginning of February 2021, to the Fashion Network information site.
A surprising oasis of prosperity in a ready-to-wear market which is going through a clear crisis in France. According to the observatory of the French Fashion Institute (IFM), there was an annual decline of 8.3% in sales in value in October. Over ten months, the market is barely above the first ten months of 2022.
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