Grace & Mila, the French Prêt-à-porter brand for women’s fashion, founded in 2011, pursues major international ambitions. After the brand spent several years to build its reputation and community in France, it now focuses on global expansion.
Although Grace & Mila has existed for 14 years, the past five years have been decisive for their development. During this period, the brand was able to strengthen its international presence by opening shop-in-shops in large department stores such as Sokos in Finland, a presence in Duty Free Shops from about ten airports such as Prague, Malaga, Sevilla, and Krakow and the opening of Franchise Boutiques. Grace & Mila now has 1,800 sales outlets in 40 countries and has 700 wholesale companies in France. The international share of sales rose from 7 percent to currently 35 percent.
“The development of our international online shop is our most important project for the coming years.”
The brand continues this dynamic and now wants to expand its online shop and make customers accessible worldwide. “This is our most important project for the coming years,” explains Julie Gédéon, international sales manager at Grace & Mila, in an interview with Fashionunited. The online shop, which is already available in France and some neighboring countries, will soon offer global deliveries and the opportunity to buy in other currencies as euros.
A first international flagship store?
The brand is also considering the opening of a new flagship store, but the project is not yet concrete: “After the opening of our flagship store in Paris, we found that there is a great demand from our customers. You need this” meeting point “where you can find the entire range of the brand. Even if Grace & Mila is multichannel-capable and we are still present in the Wholesale, this demand is very strong, ”explains the sales manager.
Grace & Mila today has five shops in France: the flagship store in Paris and the franchise branches in Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry, Bayonne and Lyon. The brand is now thinking about international openings: “We are actively working on putting pressure on us. We do not pursue an aggressive one, but a strategic expansion policy. We examine various offers and will take the necessary time to find the right business, the right place and the right partners: inside that match our vision and our values,” says Gédéon.
“Belgium, Spain, Italy and Germany are our largest markets to France.”
Gédéon, who came to the company seven years ago, immediately concentrated on the international development of the brand. “I focused on what worked in France to develop it internationally,” she confirms.
Grace & Mila’s key markets
“There are two cases here: We have our own shop in Paris, which is our flagship store and we have opened franchise branches with partners: I have observed the results of these two offers, and today we will prefer franchise companies for the international business. We will probably open a second flagship store in France, but at the moment it has no priority,” adds Gédon.
While France remains the main market of the brand, other countries are also emerging: “Historically there are Belgium, followed by Spain, Italy and Germany,” said Gédéon. “There are differences between the southern countries, be it Portugal, Spain or Greece, and the purchase habits of the Scandinavian countries such as Finland or Norway,” says the sales manager.
A family matter
There are three siblings behind Grace & Mila: Patrick, Patricia and Julie Chou. “They started this adventure with the creation of some sweater models. Due to the success of their pieces, they developed the project further and designed further models until a brand with a diverse offer was created. Even if they had some knowledge in the trade and fashion thanks to their family, the three founders were quite young and just came from school when they started the project,” says Gédéon.
Although the brand does not publish its sales figures, it indicates that several of its international markets achieve annual sales of over one million euros. Grace & Mila will soon be planning the opening of shop-in-shops in large department stores: three in Greece and two in Finland.
This article previously appeared on fashionunited.fr and was used with the help of digital tools translated.
Fashionunited uses the AI-based language tool Gemini 2.0 to accelerate the translation of articles and improve the end result. They help us make the international reporting of fashionunited a German -speaking readership quickly and comprehensively accessible. Articles that have been translated using AI-based tools are read and carefully edited by our editor: Correcting inside before they are published.