“Do you have women’s clothes now?” In Celio’s new boutique in Lille, among the models dressed in plain trousers and pastel-coloured shirts, 18-year-old Clémence asks her friend Valentin why he has come. “Back to school dress”As a seasoned buyer, the young woman (who did not want to give her name) noticed this unprecedented entry by Celio into the women’s ready-to-wear market with a title that means nothing to her, but which is reborn after a traumatic end and a social waste: Camaïeu.
Bought at auction in December 2022 by Celio for 1.8 million euros, the name of the former northern company, which was liquidated in October of the same year, now represents the women’s clothing sold by the menswear brand. The first of these “mixed” stores was opened on Thursday 29 August at the Westfield shopping centre in Lille by Celio’s bosses. But Camaïeu appears discreetly. Apart from a neon sign “Be Camaïeu” followed by an asterisk next to Celio’s slogan “Be normal” above the entrance to the store, nothing announces the return of the brand.
Twenty-two months earlier, the disappearance of the brand (511 stores closed in France, 2,600 employees made redundant) had caused considerable turmoil. And for most of the former employees, this “Renaissance” brings back bad memories. “I am not at all happy. Of the 150 people I worked with in the Roubaix warehouse, [Nord]There are still around a hundred who have not found work”, testifies a former employee of the logistics department, who remained in Camaïeu for thirty years.
“Rather, let’s talk about the future”
She wishes to remain anonymous. “so as not to have worries” with the company where he found work, and he never imagines for a moment that one day he will walk through the door of a Celio store to dress in Be Camaïeu. “We are going to boycott. The brand is us, not them.” The decision was made in the WhatsApp group of former employees with whom he remained in contact.
“Rather, let’s talk about the future”“This is what Marc Grosman said at the opening of the new Celio-Camaïeu store. Co-founder of the Celio brand with his brother Laurent, Marc Grosman invested between 15 and 20 million euros to offer Camaïeu women’s items in his stores. To date, there are twelve in France, new or expanded for the occasion. A hundred employees have been recruited, including ten former Camaïeu employees.
In the minds of the Grosman brothers (present in the list of the 500 largest fortunes in France drawn up by the magazine Challenges), the purchase of the Camaïeu brand responded to a very specific objective: to expand the offer and thus compete with the big international names in ready-to-wear.
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