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"Bonpoint is completely different," says Richard Alibert, president of the company. "We are focused only on children and on dressing them every day." Although making kids' clothes might seem to be a simple matter of adapting design and manufacturing techniques to smaller sizes, he and others say it's much trickier. To cover the 0-to-14-year-old market requires 25 sizes with drastically different designs depending on whether a baby is lying down or starting to sit up, or whether he or she is still in diapers. Most items must be washable, and they must be comfortable—no scratchy fabrics or seams allowed. Even when pants cost $89, knit tops $76, parkas $356 and astrakhan pieces go for $763, as they do at Bonpoint, the profit margins are lower than those for grownups, since high-end customers seek top-quality fabrics and subtle trims and detailing but expect children's clothing—even expensive children's clothing—to cost significantly less than their own. And there are fewer opportunities for high-margin add-ons. Even the most precocious Bonpoint customers have little need for leather handbags, although the current management has high hopes for developing perfumes and skin-treatment lines.
The complications come into focus at the Bonpoint creative studio on Wednesdays, when French schoolchildren have the day off. Like all Paris fashion houses, Bonpoint has a roster of "house models" who are paid (in pains au chocolat and clothing vouchers) to do fittings. First there's a story, maybe a moment on someone's lap, and if ever there are tears or fussing, the fitting is called off.
Alas, brand loyalty is short lived. Once Karl Lagerfeld has seduced a girl, Chanel can hope to keep her for life. At Bonpoint, customers grow up and move on, so every 10 years the company must attract new ones. That is where the Cohens excelled. "I always insisted that we have someone in the studio with a baby in her arms," says Marie-France. In 1993 she hired Domitille Brion as a studio designer. "My jeunesse," Marie-France says whenever she refers to Brion, who is now an independent consultant. Together, over 10 years they honed the key codes that the current Bonpoint team of designers still references. If people want pink—and 65% of sales for little girls are pink—give them verdigris, says Marie-France. "Bonpoint is not here to serve customers the soup they asked for, but to propose something they didn't know they wanted."
Aesthetically, Cohen drew on her childhood experiences in Paris, where she grew up in an artistic family of eight children. (Many of her siblings went on to do their own creative thing—a sister, who died in 1999, founded Annick Goutal perfumes; another is an illustrator and designs theater décors.) "Our mother didn't have a lot of money, but the word we heard most often was regardez. Look at all the beautiful buildings in Paris. Look at the paintings, the furniture," Marie-France will tell you if you push the garden gate to the home she and Bernard purchased with the proceeds from the sale of the company, appropriately two doors down from a school. "You were told to train your eye, and always there was a disassociation of beauty and taste from the idea of money. That is the secret."