Start from crafts: When entrepreneurs take a step back to re-create small-scale companies

Abstract

Old fashion system lays on a network made of family businesses, from prestigious tailors and bootmakers to modest clothing retouchers. In the global capital of fashion, Paris, they have been almost wiped out by the delocalisation along the 20th century. However, since its damages have been measured, there is a trend through young fashion entrepreneurs aiming the renewal of French fashion savoir-faire. Since 2019, I am studying some of these initiatives in the field of leatherwork (maroquinerie), and focusing from 2021 on one particular Paris brand : Laperruque. Working there both as an anthropologist and as a craftswoman, I have questionned the stakes of developing a small-scale company, limiting its growth, and identified the limits of such entrepreneurial initiative.

Starting from scratch, with barely no investment fund, the two founders of Laperruque refer to traditional business model and not to start-ups, laying on financial speculation. However, the company is not just an unchanged reproduction of ancient familial businesses, since they also try to fix some of the contemporary working failings and the main fashion industry’s issues. The following paper highlights the ideals constructed through the young craftsman-entrepreneurs’ discourses and the negotiations necessary for their project to last.