Café Coton sold 1.2M shirts a year — the rescue kept 5 stores and 40 jobs

Café Coton was created in 1990 by Charles-Augustin Jeuffrain around a single idea: the high-end cotton shirt, made in Egyptian cotton, sold under a deliberately un-British French name. It became a fixture of men's ready-to-wear — 1.2 million shirts a year in France, more than 20 million cumulatively, at accessible prices (four shirts for €99) — and it had already survived hard times, including an earlier safeguard procedure. Its founder came from textile stock: the Jeuffrain family had run weaving works at Louviers since 1815.

By 2025 the model had buckled. The diagnosis offered in the trade press was threefold: designs judged dated, a store network too dense for the sales it produced, and omnichannel sales poorly mastered. In April the company was placed in receivership; by early May it was in judicial liquidation with activity continuing, about 100 employees waiting for a buyer while the brand's future was marketed by the court.

In June 2025 the Bobigny commercial court approved a sale plan in favour of BCRI Holding, chaired by Benoit Crouzatier. The perimeter was surgical: five shops out of nineteen, roughly forty employment contracts, the brand, the stock and the website. The retained stores were the premium-visibility ones — rue de Rivoli, rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, rue Gustave Courbet, Boulogne-Billancourt and a shopping-centre site.

The arithmetic of the rescue tells the case: a network of nineteen shops cut to five, a payroll of about 100 cut to some forty contracts. What survived was the brand name, the best addresses and the lowest fixed-cost base the court's buyer could assemble — the rest of the 35-year-old chain paid for the density it had built.