Europe, I now share that idea. Without a factory, you have nothing to sell to your customers.” Corinne noticed after her
return that a lot of knowledge about manufacturing headwear in France had been lost. “That broke my heart. It triggered me to try to set up a workshop or small factory for hats and caps in France: first, because I love producing in a factory and hated to see that important skills and knowledge were disappearing in my own country; but also because I had learned that Chinese love everything French. Not the kind of items Complement sells, which are low-cost textile accessories, but high-class quality products and brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel.”
While Corinne was thinking about setting up a factory, in 2019 she received a phone call from the previous owner of Fléchet to let her know he was going to sell the brand. “Things couldn’t have
worked out better! Fléchet is the oldest French hat brand and oozes tradition. It has such a huge story to tell, and was just the kind of brand I was looking for. The Fléchet company used to belong to a very big family who exported to countries such as the US, Japan and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Hat shops in the US still know the brand name quite well, which is great because although the core market for us is France, we see a big potential market in regions such as Asia, Australia, Canada, etc.” Complement took over all the machinery, and one employer, from the previous owner and moved everything to a new workshop in Loudun in western France, where they started producing from scratch. “In Loudun, where Complement is based, there used to be a school for sewing where a few of the women who work in our company used to go. As they already had an interest in making hats, they were a perfect group to
start our production with. They learn very quickly and we are now producing a few models from the sewn hats and caps collection ourselves. We are talking about 30 per cent of our catalogue and these numbers keep going up.”
Corinne’s goal is to bring the whole production of the Fléchet collection step by step to France.
In the Fléchet factory
may 2022 | 19
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