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Jacques-Antoine Granjon — you can call him JAG; everybody does — doesn't look like your typical French businessman. A hulking figure with shoulder-length curls and long pointy shoes, he looks like a cross between Louis XIV and Yogi Bear. In a country that mistrusts successful businesspeople and dislikes oddballs, JAG is both, and the French, amazingly, love him for it. His friend Pierre Corthay, who custom-makes Granjon's pointy shoes, calls JAG an ovni — French for UFO — but he means that in a good way.

Now the ovni in size-19 shoes is landing in the U.S. Not many people outside France know it, but Granjon pioneered the much hyped flash-sale business — a $1.75 billion-a-year industry in the U.S. expected to grow to $5 billion to $8 billion in the next five years — in 2001 when he founded Vente-privee.com. Flash-sale sites, which sell brands' excess inventory online at deep discounts for a limited time, got big in the U.S. at the height of the global downturn, when even full-price luxury shoppers were cutting back and retailers were drowning in overstock. Now Granjon, who spent those years wooing European luxury lovers, is making a bid for American shoppers with a U.S. e-commerce site he launched in December with American Express. The goal is to hit $500 million in U.S. sales within five years, a relatively modest ambition that reflects the difficulty of the task ahead. Vente-privee — a household name in France that has expanded into seven other European countries — knows that winning American shoppers away from fast-growing U.S. competitors like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and Ideeli won't be easy. Granjon says his ties to AmEx's rich client base and big European brands will help. The question is whether U.S. brands will come along, especially as the economy recovers and luxury brands rein in their overstock. U.S. flash-sale sites "benefited from significant levels of overstock and very strong brands," says Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester. But "the quality of merchandise and quantity of overstock has contracted."

Granjon has reason to be optimistic. Vente-privee reported sales of $1.4 billion last year, up 14% from the year before and almost double its sales of three years ago, making it one of Europe's biggest online retailers. From its headquarters in La Plaine St.-Denis, a gritty industrial suburb just north of Paris, it sends out some 75,000 packages a day, containing everything from women's fashion and accessories to wine and theater tickets. Unlike its U.S. competitors, Vente-privee is profitable, a singular distinction in the flash-sale business. Granjon claims gross margins of about 35% and profits of 6% to 7%. None of Vente-privee's smaller copycats can make the same claim, says Mulpuru, since they don't follow Vente-privee's model of buying merchandise from manufacturers only after a customer places an order. Vente-privee has "a negative need for cash," says Gilles Blanc, head of research at Benchmark Group in Paris.

The world first noticed Vente-privee in 2007, when U.S. venture-capital firm Summit Partners bought 20% of the business at a price said to make it worth about $1.2 billion. Around that time, a host of similar sites appeared, the biggest being Gilt Groupe and Rue La La in the U.S. and BrandAlley in Britain. "I have great respect for what he did in France. We learned quite a lot about the business from what Granjon created," says Ben Fischman, chief executive of Rue La La, the second leading U.S. site, with sales of about $400 million.

It's certainly not where Granjon, who was born into a bourgeois Marseilles family with sterling business credentials, ever expected to end up. His grandfather was president of Roussel Uclaf, the big French pharmaceutical company; his mother was a lawyer; his father worked in real estate. Granjon was groomed to follow his forebears, with an obligatory passage through prestigious schools directly into a French corporate straitjacket.

Instead he headed into the rag trade after college, buying and selling merchandise closeouts in the alleys around Place de la République, not one of the tonier quartiers in Paris. By the end of the '90s, JAG had a thriving little business with sales of $50 million a year. Granjon likes to call himself a "jobber," an industry term for a wholesaler, which makes him sound less bourgeois, more American and not as nerdy as his dotcom brethren.

He operates out of gray warehouses next to the Stade de France that are splashed with Vente-privee's signature pink. Drivers passing La Plaine St.-Denis on the Paris périphérique can look to their right to see a sculpture of two giant sumo wrestlers hoisting a cargo container, executed by Scottish sculptor David Mach. The rest of Granjon's jumbo-size art collection is scattered among the office's wide-open computer banks, home to 1,400 employees. A massive grizzly bear brandishes two chainsaws. A big gorilla, also by Mach, is fashioned out of hangers. There are many naked women.

The real ammo behind Vente-privee is tucked behind Granjon's art collection: the in-house video, photo and recording studios used to produce cutting-edge online catalogs. Granjon believes his French marketing flair far outdoes the competition. "The Americans look at discounting very commercially: service quality, fast delivery, perfect packaging," says Granjon. "If we do it like the Americans, they don't need us. We do it with creativity, with the emotion of photos, films, music. The Americans don't know how to do that." If Vente-privee's brands appreciate that attitude more than its customers, Granjon doesn't mind. Consumers just follow the bargains; his 1,200 brands are the ones in need of coddling, he says. Rue La La CEO Fischman is skeptical: "The U.S. is littered with jobbers. The consumer experience is where the rubber meets the road in this country."

Vente-privee has other advantages. American Express's 40 million prosperous cardholders come with information and analysis of their buying habits. "AmEx's database is the gold standard," says Forrester's Mulpuru. "It's as closely guarded as the Coke formula. To get access to that is huge." AmEx also brings strong ties to overstocked brands. In the flash-sale business, competition for unsold stock — generally 2% to 8% of retailers' total sales — may count for more than the competition for customers. "Brands don't need more than two or three partners, and you're going to see consolidation," says Fischman.

Granjon knows he's late to the U.S. party. Unlike France, where discounting is a genteel affair, the U.S. is a savage ecosystem with dozens of ways to dispose of unsold merchandise. So-called liquidation sales, which include restaurant closeouts and estate sales, may be worth $100 billion in the U.S., according to Forrester. "America is tough," says Granjon. "I sat down with Lew Frankfort, head of Coach. I thought, Great, we'll get him on the site. The first thing he said was, 'We don't need you.' Coach makes $2.5 billion in outlet stores." The lesson has been to target European brands looking for their own sort of U.S. outlet. His success in stodgy Europe should make the task at hand easier, he says. "This is America. Everything is possible here."

• Josh Levine / Paris
• France's famed luxury hawker takes on the U.S.