3 Suisses

In 1932 Xavier Toulemonde founded 3 Suisses, a French mail-order house, in the textile towns of Roubaix and Croix, near Lille. It began by selling knitting wool by post, grew into one of France's two great fashion catalogs, and still sells clothing, home goods and lingerie online from Paris more than ninety years later.

Wool, a bistro and a name

The business started as the Filature des 3 Suisses, a yarn spinning and selling operation. Its first catalog, in 1932, was a guide to knitting and yarn illustrated with sketches, aimed at women who made their families' sweaters at home.

The name has a story that the company has long repeated. A local bistro owner called Monsieur Suis had three daughters, and the bistro became known as the three Suisses. Whether every detail is true is hard to check, but it explains why a firm with no Swiss connection carries the name.

Roubaix was the right place to start. The town was the center of the French wool trade, and its families built mail-order empires on the back of local mills. La Redoute, the other giant of French catalog shopping, came from the same town.

The 3 Suisses catalog years

The move into ready-to-wear came after the Second World War. In 1949 the company issued its first fashion catalog, 28 pages listing 436 items. By 1967 the catalog had switched to color photography and grown to 252 pages, with about 2.5 million copies sent out.

For several decades that catalog was how much of provincial France bought its clothes. As in other general catalogs of the era, underwear and nightwear sat alongside the dresses and coats, and for households far from a department store, mail order was often the easiest place to buy a bra, a girdle or a set of cotton briefs. Furniture and garden catalogs followed in 1975 and 1976.

Designers on the page

3 Suisses used designers to give a mass catalog some fashion weight. Sonia Rykiel created a collection for it in 1977, and Jean-Paul Gaultier followed in 1983, years before his cone bra for Madonna made him famous well beyond Paris. Philippe Starck designed furniture for the catalog, including a stool called Bubu 1er. Later collaborations included lines by Karl Lagerfeld and by Alexandre Vauthier around 2010.

In 1987 the company also teamed up with L'Oreal to found Le Club des Createurs de Beaute, a mail-order cosmetics venture.

Otto, the Mulliez family and the long decline of print

Ownership became complicated early. The German mail-order group Otto took a 51 percent stake in 1981. French Wikipedia also lists the Mulliez family association, the clan behind Auchan, among the company's past owners, though the size and dates of its holding are not set out there. The business sat inside a holding called 3 Suisses International, or 3SI, which ran some 16 e-commerce brands. In January 2014 Otto became the sole shareholder.

The catalog model was already in trouble by then. In 2009 the company announced a restructuring and job cuts to shift toward e-commerce. In 2014 it stopped printing its catalog altogether, ending an 82-year run.

Shopinvest and a smaller Parisian 3 Suisses

The Belgian arm of the company was declared bankrupt in July 2018. In November that year Shopinvest, a French e-commerce group founded by Karine Schrenzel and Olivier Gensburger, bought Livelle, the company behind the 3 Suisses brand, for an undisclosed sum. The head office moved from Villeneuve-d'Ascq in the north to Paris.

Under its new owner the brand has been rebuilt as a smaller online retailer. A print catalog returned in 2019, at about 60 pages rather than the hundreds of the 1960s. The company has also folded several other web brands into the 3 Suisses site, among them Sofactory, Declikdeco and Womancorner.

Lingerie on the current site

Today's 3 Suisses sells fashion for women, men and children, plus bedding, decor and shoes. Lingerie keeps its own department, covering bras, briefs, nightwear, swimwear and shapewear. The site leans on its French heritage and on products made in France. The opening line on its homepage still dates the company's know-how to 1932, the year a Roubaix spinning firm first mailed out a knitting guide.

Last updated October 7, 2026