Did you say Design?
Story of a before / after by Marie-Caroline Guinier, founder of Petites Reines.
Before
Design and me were a long-distance relationship. In summary, facing the designer Jean Prouvé, I had a hard time feeling. I was like a child against the wall of an aquarium: it's beautiful, smooth, a little hypnotic, but nothing emerges, and the fish remain inexorably silent.
After
To meet design, I met designers. And not just any. Working alongside Fred Frety, Katja Liebig, Anne Sheldon Duplaix, allowed me to enter this fabulous world, and to totally revisit my a priori, and I tell you here how:
A good dose of listening
Florence Foresti is much better than me at portraying the image of the designer with a solitary and wacky creation, which gives rise to all sorts of strange creations such as the veritable labyrinth of the ear, for example. https://youtu.be/SHDmBD1bzFo
With Fred and his team, it's all about hearing. But this time, she is listening, attentive to my vision and to each of the verbatim collected from the nascent community of little queens: these 400 women whom I interviewed for 3 months to understand their relationship to cycling, their feelings about their equipment, their frustrations, but also their desires and dreams.
A hell of a stroke of the pen
Is it a coincidence that the adventure of Petites Reines makes me think of the Little Prince? “Fred, design me a nice bike bag”. And here is an intriguing object. Curves, crazy red aluminum wire, stem green, …, wood, a leather strap … and voila, LAURA will be a basket!
Emotion
Words are my playground. It is therefore this raw material that I delivered to Fred and his team, to lay the foundations of what would become our brand. I have described the Paris that touches me. The one where I was born, where I grew up, where I changed.
From Paris-architecture, where Guimard is familiar with Haussmann, to Paris-pleasure where the hubbub of the terraces is like a soft coat that you wrap yourself in winter.
This colorful Paris, where the Maison Gatti chairs are in unison with the shimmering atmosphere of the terraces.
This Paris so envied by all the women in the world: here elegance is not a story of codes, but of allure.
Because basically, Paris is above all about freedom. That of dreaming, of sighing, of crossing paths, of exchanging a look. A city where one criss-crosses at will, never in a straight line.
A momentum too: " To us two Paris".
A spirit of synthesis
Here is the brief, you have 4 hours... Fred and his team will talk much better than me about the steps that followed. But I would like to dethrone a received idea. That according to which the good idea of the designer arrives like an illumination, in the middle of the night. Admittedly, we slept little, dreamed a lot, but above all iterated a lot, to manage to encapsulate these words in the Laura basket.
Thank you, Fred, Katja, Anne and … Laura, for introducing me to design.