PARIS — Sustainable Parisian bag brand Rivedroite is playing up its cool factor with a new café and concept store opening Wednesday.
The eight-year-old brand was founded by sisters Yasmine Auquier Buron and Sofia Buron, along with Aurélie Jansem, to create a line of ethical and practical pouches and totes. Utilitarian and chic, the label quickly became popular, with bags soon slung over the shoulders of hip Parisians.
The new space is called Rivedroite Club, and will be home to its new clothing line, featuring T-shirts, sweatshirts and sweaters as well as lifestyle products and quirky goodies such as matchbooks, magnets and small locks alongside its established bags, accessories and hit branded baseball cap.
Spread across two stories at 1,075 square feet, Rivedroite Club will house a café upstairs, featuring a specially created bean blend by fair trade Parisian roaster Plural, accompanied by pastries from Margo Coffee & Food.
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A vintage ’90s photo booth anchors the downstairs, alongside magazines and books curated by Bonjour Jacob bookstore as well as vinyls handpicked by record shop Smile Bazaar. It’s also kitted out with a repair and customization bar, which can add patches, charms or embroidery to items, and will work on items from other brands.
The space at 10 Rue de Richelieu was envisioned by Ūti Architectes design duo Victoria Ayayi and Gabriel Vuillemin, who preserved existing elements while exposing some of the structural bones. The new outpost retains the same warm woods as its original Marais store, opened last year, and takes cues from the brand’s workshop.
In the store, everything is made from recycled or reused vintage fabrics and products, and the layout features a modular design that can be moved around to change up the space. DJ Agathe Mougin will spin for the official opening party Wednesday night — she launched a capsule collection with the brand last year — and the owners promise to turn the shop space into a dance floor.
The new Club concept comes as Rivedroite is prepped for rapid expansion. After testing the U.S. waters for two seasons, they’re ready to fully dive in. The company will open a warehouse in Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025 to service the region, and expand its department store wholesale and marketplace business.
“It’s the right time for us. We wanted to wait through that test time, because a lot of French and European brands have had trouble with the U.S. market,” Yasmine said. In the last year, the brand has launched a U.S. site and was fully reordered by all of the 30 multibrand retailers in the U.S. that had onboarded it. The trio is now looking at launching pop-ups in L.A., New York and at SXSW in Austin next year.
Crossbody bags retail at $85, while larger weekender totes tap out at $130. “There’s a space for that price range in the bag and lifestyle business,” Yasmine said. “The American consumer reacted very, very positively to the brand and our vision of how consumption should be.”
Rivedroite was launched in 2016 with strict ethical production standards to address both environmental and social concerns. The bags are made from recycled and upcycled materials sourced from apparel production in Morocco to repurpose the industry’s surplus.
A decentralized production model supports 65 independent tailors and eight independent family workshops with micro-financing. The brand is poised to scale up with a new logistics platform employing 40 seamstresses to support the U.S. growth.
Rivedroite will extend its sustainable credentials to its apparel. “The new products are in the same vibe — always eco-conceived, inclusive, fun and in the right price range,” Yasmine said.
Sofia worked for four months to develop the fabric for the new apparel, which achieves a balance of softness and sustainability meant to remind the customer of their favorite vintage find.
“We never want to choose between sustainability and quality,” Yasmine said. “So, it’s very difficult to make a product, actually.” The clothing will be made in Portugal.
The new proprietary thread for T-shirts and sweatshirts is 50 percent recycled cotton and 50 percent organic cotton. It’s the first of the team’s proprietary materials.
They’re deep into R&D on several innovations; the brand is poised to launch another new textile in the first quarter of 2025 that will be made in France. That fabric and its accompanying collection should increase their appeal in colder markets, and they will make it available to other brands.
The brand will keep its 400-square-foot store in the Marais that opened last November.
“We were not able to express the entire brand as we’ve had in mind since day one,” Yasmine said of the first store’s small size. The trio had always dreamed of having a destination that was more than just a shop. “We want a place where people are happy to come and have nice time and really be embraced by our team, be part of our tribe.”
The Marais location gets a lot of foot traffic from American and Asian tourists. “It has been a very nice lab for us,” said Yasmine, as the brand seeks to make inroads in those markets. It’s already in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, and will launch at Another Story concept store in Bangkok later this month. “We believe a lot in Southeast Asia, it’s a booming market,” Yasmine said. South Korea and Taiwan are also in the works.
The new Rue de Richelieu outpost is envisioned as more of a hangout spot in an area filled with office workers and locals, while it can still capitalize on its proximity to the Louvre and Palais-Royal to draw tourists.
Some of the merchandise is emblazoned with the phrase “Paris is my hometown” and a logo to play up the local angle, but is also small enough to fit into a suitcase.
“You can bring home a little piece of the cool, Rivedroite-style vibe of Paris, which for us looks a lot like Williamsburg,” Yasmine said.
Taking a collective approach, the team plans to host monthly events with other sustainable brands and build an ecosystem of brands with similar goals.
“This corresponds to the vision of the brand, which is when we team up with experts in their field we can grow on a very sustainable basis, and this is very important for us,” Jansem said. Beauty products and eyewear are two products they are currently exploring.
Added Yasmine: “It’s our vision of the world as well, to say we can team up as two brands, it’s cool. There’s space for everyone.”
