Bay windows, carpeted floors and espresso coffees available – the room could look like any meeting room in an office building. But at the Monoprix headquarters in Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine), hundreds of objects, a heterogeneous set of shapes and colors, are piled up on the floor and on the shelves. They are all the result of the brand’s collaborations with interior designers or architects over the last ten years: a three-legged vase by Ionna Vautrin, mugs with watercolor motifs by Constance Guisset, a velvet chair by Vincent Darré, a cart from gold purchases from India Mahdavi… Among the latest novelties to arrive: a powder pink armchair by Fleur Delesalle and the reissue of a luminous globe signed by Jean-Pierre Garrault and Henri Delord, excerpts from a collection that will be launched at the beginning of December and brings together no less than nine French designers.
“We are a little or even completely bulimic! “, recognizes Lilian Rosas, deputy general director of Monoprix and director of textiles, home, leisure, who, since her arrival in 2009, has had some 170 collaborations, fashion and design combined. “Often, faced with the creativity of guest designers, we don’t know how to stop: four models of cushions become twelve, a set of plates becomes a whole set of dishes… And we can allow that, because behind it, our manufacturing processes are very established”, continues this Brazilian in front of piles of boxes containing prototypes and technical sheets from past collections.
The ambition of the brand, which began with decorative objects and is now moving towards small furniture, is to follow in the footsteps of Prisunic (merged with Monoprix in 1997) and its “design for everyone”, expression established by an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, in 2021-2022 (“Design for all: from Prisunic to Monoprix, a French adventure”). Or everyday pieces signed by big names and accessible to everyone, according to a slogan that has become famous: “Beauty at the price of ugliness.”
“Test, fail, repeat”
It is in the tidy Clichy trinket, where we sit in the round chairs of the Italian Gae Aulenti (created for Prisunic in 1969, reissued in 2023), where the collections that brighten the store shelves every year are born. The designers present their intentions, discover the prototypes, validate the models until the final exhibition. “When you enter this cave of Ali Baba, you realize in the blink of an eye everything that is possible: the shapes, the materials, the production…” says India Mahdavi, who signed “in joy” two series of objects in 2017 and 2020. The star designer and architect has She didn’t hesitate when the Monoprix style office contacted her for the first time: “I saw the opportunity to abolish the boundaries between the exclusive image we can have of design and decidedly more affordable pieces. You cannot refuse that carte blanche. »
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