La Redoute: the €1 sale that ended Kering's 20-year mail-order bet

La Redoute started in 1837 as a wool mill in Roubaix, northern France, and published its first mail-order catalogue in 1928. For the rest of the century the catalogue was a fixture of French homes — a thick book of clothes and homewares mailed to millions of households. The Pinault group (PPR, later Kering) bought it in 1994 and folded it into Redcats, its distance-selling arm.

The decline was structural and long. From 2010 sales fell about 10% a year as catalogue shopping moved online and Amazon and fast fashion took the customers. La Redoute lost tens of millions of euros every year. Its costs — print catalogues, national logistics, thousands of staff — were built for a volume that was leaving, and Kering, which had been selling off its distribution businesses since 2001 to refocus on luxury, was not funding a turnaround.

In December 2013 Kering agreed to hand the company to its own managers — La Redoute CEO Nathalie Balla and Redcats secretary-general Eric Courteille — for a symbolic €1. The sale was signed on 2 June 2014, with the managers taking 51% and employees 49%. Before letting go, Kering recapitalized the group: €315 million earmarked for transformation and €180 million for social measures; the buyers had asked for €600 million. Le Monde counted the whole episode as costing Kering several hundred million euros.

The sale did not revive the business. The new owners cut 1,178 of 3,437 jobs over four years, yet 2015 still closed with a €40 million loss on €750 million in revenue. The company has never returned to profit since.

Kering recapitalized La Redoute with €495M, then sold it to its own managers for €1, cutting 1,178 jobs but never returning to profit.

The product was dying faster than the costs could: print mail-order lost about 10% of its sales every year, while catalogues, logistics and staff were fixed costs built for a bigger volume — revenue

The owner had stopped believing: Kering had been shedding its distribution businesses since 2001 to concentrate on luxury, and an unwanted subsidiary gets underinvested — which deepened the decline it

The exit was the most expensive option: the company was given away for €1 only after Kering recapitalized it with hundreds of millions — more than a decade of annual losses, paid up front in one lump.

The handover to insiders postponed the reckoning instead of ending it: cutting 1,178 jobs and shrinking the company kept it alive but never made it profitable — it was still losing money a decade

A parent that wants out stops investing — and the decline it blames on the market is partly its own doing.

Galeries Lafayette took a 51% stake in 2017 and the rest in 2022. La Redoute was still loss-making in 2024 — €21.7 million on €650 million in revenue with 1,337 employees — and announced another 171 job cuts in May 2026.