Twenty-two garments on one rail, a wet March morning in 2014, and a kettle from an atelier on Solonos.
Élise Marchand and Sofia Antonopoulou met in Paris in 2011, over a wool coat that neither of them bought. Élise was twelve years into a buying career at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. Sofia was in the third generation of a tailoring family whose workshop her grandfather Andreas had opened on Solonos in 1957 and whose lease her mother Marianthi finally gave up in 2009.
What they agreed on that afternoon was narrow and has not changed: that a shop should carry fewer things than it can sell, that whoever buys the clothes should be in the room when they are tried on, and that anything sold ought to be repairable by someone whose name the customer knows. Everything else about Maison is an argument they have had since.
We say no to nine pieces for every one we say yes to. That ratio is the whole business. It is why the rails look sparse to anyone arriving from a department store, why we carry no more than 180 styles a season, and why a piece that sells out sometimes does not come back — if the second cut is worse than the first, there is no version of stocking it that is honest.
The three questions have not changed either, and they get asked every morning before the door opens. Did we buy it for a real woman. Would we wear it ourselves. Will it last seven seasons. A surprising number of very beautiful things fail the third one.
What we got wrong is worth writing down too. We spent 2016 trying to be a shop with a shoe wall and it took eighteen months to admit we were bad at it. We opened a concession in a Kifisia department store in 2018 and closed it in eleven months, because a rail without one of us standing next to it is just stock. And for two years we published a size chart copied from a supplier that did not match anything we actually sold, which is the mistake that still makes Sofia wince.