---
title: 'Polène Paris — company profile'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/companies/pol-ne-paris'
type: 'company'
updated: '2026-07-02'
---

# Polène Paris

> French luxury leather-goods house selling minimalist handbags, small leather goods, and jewelry direct-to-consumer, designed in Paris and hand-made in Ubrique, Spain.

- **Website:** https://www.polene-paris.com
- **Type:** Private (L Catterton minority stake, 2024)
- **Headquarters:** Paris, France
- **Founded:** 2016
- **Founders:** Elsa Mothay, Antoine Mothay, Mathieu Mothay
- **Latest round:** Minority stake · L Catterton · July 2024
- **Investors:** L Catterton, Eutopia (former), Otium Capital (former)
- **Business model:** Vertically-integrated direct-to-consumer luxury retail
- **Industries:** Retail
- **Open roles:** 83
- **Profile:** https://feeny.ai/companies/pol-ne-paris

## What they do

Polène designs and sells minimalist leather handbags, small leather goods, and sculpted 24-carat-gold jewelry under its own name. Products are designed in Paris and hand-made by around 800 artisans in Ubrique, Spain, then sold only through the brand's own e-commerce site and boutiques (vertically integrated direct-to-consumer).

## Overview

**The handbag house three siblings built without a fashion pedigree**

Polène started with a bet that sounds almost naive: that you could sell a genuinely well made leather bag at a fraction of what a heritage house charges, and skip the middlemen entirely. Elsa, Antoine, and Mathieu Mothay, great-grandchildren of the family behind the Normandy label Saint James, launched it in Paris in 2016 after Antoine spent 18 hours a day for months learning the craft, including a full year in Spain.

A decade later the numbers say the bet worked. The company behind the French and international business booked close to 143 million euros in 2023, up 123 percent in a year, with roughly 80 percent of sales coming from outside France. In July 2024 L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by LVMH, bought a minority stake, a signal that the biggest name in luxury noticed the quiet brand eating into the affordable end of its market.

## What They Do

**Minimalist leather goods, designed in Paris and cut by hand in Spain**

Polène designs and sells minimalist handbags, small leather goods, and a newer line of sculpted 24 carat gold jewelry, all under its own name and sold only through its own channels. The look is deliberately quiet: organic, nature inspired shapes with almost no visible logo, the opposite of status branding.

The making is where the story lives. Bags are designed in Paris and produced by around 800 artisans in Ubrique, Spain, a town known for luxury leatherwork, using Italian and Spanish leather. A single bag can take up to 18 hours of hand work, which is the whole pitch: heritage-house construction at a price a heritage house would never quote.

## Products

**A numbered lineup, led by the bags that went viral**

Polène names its bags by number rather than by trend, and a handful of them carry the brand. The Numéro Un, Numéro Neuf, Numéro Dix, and the Cyme tote are the recurring best sellers, with the Numéro Dix widely credited for breaking the brand in the US through TikTok unboxings. The jewelry line is the newest bet, extending the same sculpted, understated aesthetic from leather into gold.

## Business Model

**Own the maker, own the store, skip the wholesaler**

Polène is vertically integrated direct-to-consumer. It controls the product from design in Paris through production in its Ubrique workshops, then sells only through its own e-commerce site and its own boutiques, with no department stores or wholesale in between. That control over the chain is what lets it hold the price down while keeping the margin, and it is the reason the brand can charge a few hundred euros for a bag whose construction reads like a much pricier one.

Around 28 percent of revenue comes from the physical stores, with the rest online, so the website is not a marketing afterthought here. It runs on one of the largest Shopify setups in Europe, which is why the company is now building an in-house tech team from scratch.

## Proof

**€143M in revenue and a viral second life on TikTok**

The traction is real and mostly organic. The French and international operating company reported close to 143 million euros in 2023 revenue, a 123 percent jump, with 80 percent of it international. The other proof point is cultural: posts under the Polène hashtag on TikTok rose 143 percent between 2023 and 2024, and the brand's numbered bags became a running unboxing genre without a splashy ad budget behind them.

## What People Say

**Praised as smart value, watched for creeping prices**

The recurring verdict across shoppers and forums is that Polène is one of the smartest buys in affordable luxury: clean design, solid leather, honest construction for the money. The criticism is just as consistent. Some owners flag hardware and finishing that wears over time, and a growing number note that prices keep climbing, which chips at the value story that made the brand in the first place.

## Funding

**Bootstrapped for years, then an LVMH-backed stake**

For most of its life Polène grew on its own cash and early backing from French investors, not venture rounds. That changed in July 2024, when L Catterton, the private equity arm associated with LVMH and Bernard Arnault, took a minority stake, buying out earlier holder Eutopia. The deal size was not disclosed, and the founding siblings retain control, but it puts the brand inside the orbit of the world's largest luxury group while it stays independently run.

## Team & Culture

**A Paris atelier that grew past 200 people and is still hiring hard**

Polène frames itself around three words it repeats in its own careers material: humility, excellence, and inventiveness. The Paris headquarters, on rue du Louvre in the 2nd arrondissement and rebuilt at the end of 2024, has grown from a handful of people to well over 200, and the tone in its job posts is a scale-up in a hurry that still cares about craft.

Hiring runs across two very different worlds at once. On one side it is filling retail and store leadership roles across its boutiques in Paris, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul, Milan, Vienna, Dubai, Singapore, and Beijing, plus artisans and industrialization roles tied to the Spanish workshops. On the other it is standing up a brand new digital and engineering team in Paris to run its Shopify platform. Nearly every role is on-site, which is a deliberate choice, not an oversight.

## Compensation

**What the disclosed US retail roles pay**

Pay disclosure is thin and skewed toward the US store network, since French postings rarely list a band. The US retail roles that do disclose land in the low-to-mid twenties per hour for sales positions and a bit lower for some support roles, with a few salaried roles in the roughly 60,000 to 100,000 dollar range. French roles come with the standard local package instead of a posted number: 25 days of paid leave plus RTT days, subsidized health cover, a transit or mobility allowance, and ClassPass.

## Company details

- **Mission:** Combine minimalism and creative expression through artisanal craftsmanship, bridging the gap between heritage luxury houses and mass-market labels with well-made leather goods at accessible prices.
- **Products:** Handbags & leather goods, Jewelry
- **Customer segments:** Luxury consumers, Affordable-luxury shoppers, International DTC customers
- **Buyers / users:** Design-conscious handbag buyers, Quiet-luxury shoppers, Younger luxury customers (TikTok-driven)
- **Competitors:** Polène positions between heritage houses (Hermès, Celine, Loewe) and mass-market/contemporary bag labels
- **What sets them apart:** Vertically-integrated DTC: no wholesale, controls product from design to store; Heritage-house construction (up to 18 hours per bag) at accessible prices; Quiet, near-logo-free minimalist design; Made in Ubrique, Spain with Italian and Spanish leather; Organic, mostly word-of-mouth and TikTok-driven brand growth
- **Tech stack:** Shopify
- **Integrations:** ERP, WMS, PSP, CRM, POS, DataLake

## Open roles (83)

- [Visual Merchandising Project Coordinator](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/455f69a6-1576-47b3-b2cb-b81595791eaa) — Paris, France / HQ
- [QA Analyst H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/8d991c6b-abcf-41bb-9ba6-692b7fce44b6) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Manager - Milano](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/ed7c6a75-4a33-4da3-96cb-de15a3067367) — Milan, Italy
- [QA Specialist H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/2d2edefd-1237-47c9-9f40-30a7ae622198) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Responsable Qualité des Process et Savoir-faire – H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/7811e420-0630-40e7-ba34-26bc93b4722d) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Chargé de qualité conception – H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/ab76d9f9-267a-431f-988b-8b96e5a585b7) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Advisor (Part-time) | London](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/1a4b0703-7998-4dc5-89e8-9a38170901dc) — London, United Kingdom
- [Chef de Projet Industrialisation Nouveaux Produits – H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/6975d6fe-7fe8-442e-bff7-5d09c357fa81) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Stock Associate - Singapore](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/a82b3db1-cb08-4cef-998f-5348a5dbf5b2) — Singapore, Singapore
- [Comptable Général - Immobilisations, Social, Transport, Fiscalité générale H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/63c1bdab-8e0b-453f-a340-9780fa8a7b20) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Stock Controller](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/8677a7d6-a0e4-4319-9fc3-b27172aa4cb5) — Villamartín, Spain
- [Sales Advisor - Costa Mesa (Store opening)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/15004bf9-9a0e-49d7-9a56-d191af5f6857) — Costa Mesa, CA
- [Comptable Général - Ventes & Trésorerie H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/fe5786e9-8af2-4988-b17d-e7aa26aef678) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Advisor (Full-time) | London](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/745e16d5-64e3-4fdf-8fbf-c1c65958e10d) — London, United Kingdom
- [Retail Training & Excellence Lead - North America](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/982814c2-65c4-4b3a-a122-bbef7fd2d1fc) — New York, NY / HQ
- [Stock Controller](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/d59ebaa7-7f3a-49a0-8fee-7b7378f8cd28) — Villamartín, Spain
- [Sales Advisor - Milano](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/141b8048-aeea-46cb-8ca1-bb7f433ed377) — Milan, Italy
- [Sales Associate (Emirati Nationals) - Dubaï](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/f5a762c2-5703-4e3f-98b4-56ccdc909ce1) — Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- [Visual Merchandising Design Manager](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/1da3da81-af16-46fe-8b20-325677af2536) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Conseiller de vente (CDI) - Paris](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/4a68554a-6894-421e-bc57-a415d68d8ae8) — Paris, France
- [Sales Advisor - Hamburg](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/b58b0dd7-3b21-4208-b451-a1effec2b0ce) — Hamburg, Germany
- [Manager des ventes (CDI) - Paris](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/0d9dc9d0-a6ee-41b1-a7b3-ddde0eceb4c2) — Paris, France
- [매장 직원 | Korea](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/3a2d178f-75c4-4d9c-a61c-2c00d759709e) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Stockiste (CDI) - Paris](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/b10820b0-7273-44af-8086-16de664eb3b5) — Paris, France
- [Store Manager - Chicago](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/5a11a187-0c0d-4273-b70c-2fb0939d259e) — Chicago, IL
- [Freelance Leathergoods Designer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/e3b6f4c3-a43a-4999-a84e-0989001968ca) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Advisor](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/007ae271-bdf7-473f-a7aa-e19d5e52a29c) — Chicago, IL
- [Sales Manager - Singapore](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/c298998a-5841-43f9-94d3-01b476433ea5) — Singapore, Singapore
- [Responsable HSE & Travaux](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/e7a32190-ca06-479b-a90c-5fb5af307c23) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Advisor - South Coast Plaza Costa Mesa](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/bfb15284-c4bf-489c-8033-791a8630b040) — Costa Mesa, CA
- [Comptable fournisseur H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/ed86cf42-8ea0-46f3-b747-44cb5441abf2) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Traffic Manager](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/96aedc68-7acd-4fc5-aca6-89ef0813cd1a) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Assistant Store Manager - Chicago](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/6e85edb7-1376-4df1-b649-001bb206dc52) — Chicago, IL
- [Sales Advisor - Tokyo Ginza Six / セールスアドバイザー - 東京 GINZA SIX](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/4dcfa938-86be-452d-8b80-8e1ab0a3773b) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Stockist - Costa Mesa](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/8682547e-c5ac-4e4f-9b9e-777d0f747ba3) — Costa Mesa, CA
- [Artisan Maroquinier H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/79510924-d468-4edc-a24f-03e85b63de94) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Assistant Store Manager (CDI)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/58569a98-29ea-4185-acd5-4f1d354e1212) — Paris, France
- [Talent Acquisition Associate - Retail  H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/02c22a16-87c5-4578-a073-d1a2773561e1) — Paris, France / HQ
- [PR & Influencer Marketing Specialist](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/b1480ac2-00aa-4331-9a29-c9896a308715) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Metteur au point H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/761dd867-2501-4894-b91e-8f4b6db33ace) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Advisor - Osaka Umeda Hankyu Department Store / セールスアドバイザー - 大阪 阪急うめだ本店](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/a717cdcb-dfdb-4465-a846-d366da2ebdb5) — Osaka, Japan
- [Sales Advisor - Singapore](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/4606956b-73b4-4be9-af2b-ef2ff3a18c29) — Singapore, Singapore
- [Sales Advisor Part-time - Singapore](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/a649b91c-182b-477e-8e9e-a52dbbb50892) — Singapore, Singapore
- [Stock Manager - Chicago](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/ecf0174c-95d9-4fd9-8c27-984c9cb62a21) — Chicago, IL
- [Chef de Produit Senior H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/92dd2790-1c4c-4790-964f-e71d950d17e3) — Paris, France / HQ
- [HR Business Partner Japan & South Korea](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/06076f3a-9f50-4ae2-a863-c0c0a46279e2) — Tokyo, Japan / HQ
- [Senior Leathergoods Designer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/cca1fa28-aa92-44c2-9af7-729126f620f0) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Associate - Vienna](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/e08f17b1-7b14-45c6-848d-5518e478fb0e) — Vienna, Austria
- [Developer Web H/F](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/8d2bd3bd-2d81-46d9-b82c-474f569cd548) — Paris, France / HQ
- [Sales Manager - Costa Mesa](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polene-paris/3100ea56-9b59-4724-8997-357bf6f1766f) — Costa Mesa, CA

_…and 33 more at https://feeny.ai/companies/pol-ne-paris/jobs_

---
_Source: https://feeny.ai/companies/pol-ne-paris · profile updated 2026-07-02_