Founded by Jean Cassegrain in 1948 as a leather smoking accessories maker, it was named after the Hippodrome de Longchamp racecourse in Paris, reflecting the use of stitching techniques drawn from the saddler’s trade as well as the notion of being in constant forward motion.
“Our brand has always been a franklin marshall sale lot about travelling and being active. If you look at our logo, the horse isn’t standing, it’s galloping, and this is still very much a part of our DNA,” says chief executive Jean Cassegrain, 48, grandson of the founder and son of Philippe, who is still the company’s president at 77.
“We’ve called our new Regent Street store in London La Maison in Motion.”
The brand’s most recent ads have shown Canadian model Coco Rocha dancing through the streets of New York and Alexa Chung, British model and TV presenter, coquettishly flitting around the cobbled streets of St Tropez. This happy, lively, always on the go vibe is at the heart of Longchamp, he says. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously and we don’t want to create any distance between us and our customer.”
That customer is unique because she (and he — Longchamp does a fantastic range of men’s bags, wallets and travel accessories), spans teenagers to retirees, ladies who lunch to high-powered execs. And with its calling card, the iconic Le Pliage bag, the brand has morphed from a distinctly masculine accessories brand to a particularly female global fashion label. More than 30 million of the nylon totes, which fold, origami-like, into a compact rectangle for easy storage, have been sold in the 20 years since their launch.
“We are not speaking to the ‘It’ bag fashion victim but to someone who wants to have fun,” says Sophie Delafontaine, 45, Jean’s sister and artistic director of the brand. (Their brother, Olivier, runs the brand’s US operations from New York.) “She can have a fancy Pliage with a little bit of pop, for about €100 (about $150), which she can change from season to season, and yet it’s still timeless and can work for any age and stage of life.”
It’s a brand with a loyal but diverse celebrity following; in recent years, Delafontaine has worked on collections with model Kate Moss, artist Tracey Emin and rising fashion design star Mary Katrantzou, among others. London’s coolest and most wanted attended its Regent Street flagship store opening during last September’s London Fashion Week. Alexa Chung and Pixie Geldof were behind the DJ decks, Mick Jagger and the late L’Wren Scott popped by to see his youngest model daughter, Georgia May; models Coco Rocha and Lily Cole mingled in mens franklin and marshall the crowd. Apparently Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, is also a big fan. Longchamp recently opened stores in Tel Aviv, and a recent newswire report stated that sales in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong rose 26 per cent last year.
“Being cross-generational is very important to us — it’s what makes us different to other brands because when I am designing I am not thinking about the age but the spirit of a woman,” says Delafontaine. Whether it be a handbag or wallet, wheelie case or reinterpretation of the classic deck shoe, there is a sense of Parisian elegance — chic without trying too hard — which the Cassegrain family themselves model perfectly.
“My mother Michele, who is 73 and still working so hard, is always dressed perfectly from head to toe. I am a mother of three, working full time, travelling a lot for fun and for business, and my daughter is 18 and a student. Yet we can all go shopping together and buy the same thing. I think if you compare us with other luxury brands, Longchamp is a little more optimistic because we are speaking to real women, not just the woman who has a driver waiting at the front door to take her to the hairdresser. The Longchamp woman is independent — she works, she has a family; for me, what we do is not a question of price but of philosophy.”
With her deft feminine touch, Delafontaine has brought a little more “fashion” to the house’s collections. After graduating from the prestigious Paris ESMOD fashion college and several years working with French children’s wear brand Bonpoint, Delafontaine joined Longchamp in 1993. “I arrived with some more colourful materials to change the use of leather and nylon, also working with linen and PVC and more fancy leathers with animal and reptile embossed printing.” Recent additions of ready-to-wear and shoes are 100 per cent tried and tested by Delafontaine: “If it’s something I can’t wear, it’s not in the collection.”
Longchamp’s unique selling proposition, Cassegrain says, is “building a product that is very light. We have developed a way of making things where we don’t add unnecessary details. We make it as lean and light and as soft as possible; we don’t do things that are boxy or heavy”.
The Pliage (originally designed by Philippe) comes in an enticing array of sizes and colours, in patchworked textures and printed patterns, and this season also in candy bright leathers that can be personalised in different colours and stamped with your initials. “Its versatility is what has made it such a success,” says Cassegrain.
Yet, despite sales of €462 million last year, more than 2200 employees and 254 shops globally, Longchamp is still one of fashion’s best-kept secrets. It’s something Cassegrain finds flattering but frustrating when trying to grab a greater share of the luxury accessories market, which Bloomberg estimated to be worth €57 billion last year. “Even though we have longstanding fans of the brand, we need to be a little bolder and broaden our audience because usually when people know us, they like us. And we still have room to improve, to increase our distribution and to make our brand more visible around the world,” he says.
The Cassegrains are among the last independent family-owned leather goods makers in France. “The values my grandfather instilled in Longchamp still constitute the cornerstone of our work — the search for quality, a sense of innovation and maintaining an international perspective,” explains Cassegrain. It’s a refreshing view in a market where conglomerates such as LVMH, Kering (Gucci, Alexander McQueen) or Richemont (Cartier, Chloe and Net-a-Porter) are buying up smaller brands in pursuit of market domination. For Longchamp, the key is staying true to its heritage. “We won’t be beholden to quarterly announcements and marketing gimmicks; we only do things when they are good for the long term,” says Cassegrain.
Even though the business has greatly expanded from its origins (its famous leather-covered pipes, beloved by fans such as Elvis, ceased being made in 1978), “nothing has changed”, he insists. “It’s a case of evolution rather than revolution. There was a writer recently who wrote that to be French is to love the revolution because the French are good at revolutions, but it is also to love the traditions.”
Delafontaine adds: “We are always trying to strike a balance between reinventing ourselves, of making every collection different, every story different. I don’t like to have too many rules because we are here to have fun.”
Protecting what this third generation passionately refers to as its “know-how” is vital, and the reason the company maintains a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility near Nantes, an hour out of Paris by high-speed train. “At these workshops we are being the leaders in defining our own standards,” Cassegrain says. “If you have no factory, you have no idea how something is made. It’s important to remain a manufacturer; otherwise, we are just like anybody else on the street. Our products are always made by us, to our exacting standards and design ‘recipes’.”
They are unusual too in the luxury industry for being transparent about where their products are made. Many brands skirt the issue by having a bag or wallet 80 per cent made in India and then sent to France for the last 20 per cent so it can be stamped Made in France. “It’s not very efficient in terms of logistics and organisation, and I’m not very sure it’s very ethical either,” says Cassegrain. “The ‘made in somewhere’, in my opinion, no longer means anything in our globalised world. On a Pliage bag, for example, the nylon can come from two different countries depending on the colour — sometimes from Belgium, sometimes from Taiwan. The leather can come from either The Netherlands or Uruguay; assembly can be in France, Mauritius or Tunisia. It is about trusting the brand to do its job in putting together a good product at the most affordable cost.”
Training a future generation of artisans is also key. “Our problem is that it’s becoming hard to find new people to work for us; there are not many schools who teach these skills any more, and we really want to keep our French know-how. So each year we have a little group of teenagers who join our workshop to learn from those who have been working for us for more than 40 years, to ensure we don’t lose that experience,” explains Delafontaine.
At Longchamp’s Segré facility, it is astounding to see a bag being made from start to finish, sometimes from more than 200 pieces (the average is 100). It’s constructed with a little help from hi-tech innovations such as laser cutting and sewing machines, but otherwise it’s pretty much made by hand, from the stretching of the leather over a mould to polishing the zips and press studs to a shining gleam.
The human eye is particularly important in the cutting process — “to make the most of each panel but to ensure that each piece looks the same; we would never want a back and front to be different”, explains Laure Le Cainec, communications director of Longchamp, as she guides me around the immaculate workshops, past teams of busy stitchers and cutters. (Longchamp produces more than seven million bags a year.) Nothing goes to waste — scraps of leather go towards making smaller accessories such as key rings or mouse mats to be used at head office.
The company also has longstanding relationships with tanneries to ensure their cows are “free-range, happy and mosquito-free so the leather has no bumps or scratches”, adds Le Cainec. Every white-coated factory worker is involved in each bag — it’s not just a long conveyor belt where one does the stamping, another the stitching; they all have a vested interest. “They stand for their bags because they know every detail matters ... If there’s just one tiny mistake, the whole bag is ruined, and they all feel accountable,” she says. In dissection, you would find no ugly seams or sloppy workmanship — this is unquestionably couture quality and craftsmanship but at a fraction of the price. “A Longchamp bag is a bag for life,” she says. “We regularly have customers bringing their beloved Longchamp back 20 years later to be repaired.”
Given that both Cassegrain and Delafontaine have lived and breathed the business since they were children — the family resided above the tobacco store, Au Sultan, at 9 Boulevard Poissonniere, where their grandfather started it all — was it a given that they would end up working for the family firm? “I never had any doubts,” says Cassegrain. “Longchamp always seemed like the obvious choice for me, so I never really considered anything else.” It took Delafontaine a little longer. “When you are young, you don’t want to work with your parents; you want to express yourself in your own way.” But what their grandparents and parents taught them was “to respect the customer, the product itself, the people we are working with, and to do things with passion”, says Delafontaine. “This is what takes us further — to always keep our eyes open everywhere we go, to see what’s going on, because it’s so important for our creativity. Everything in life inspires us.”