A novelty shop called Au Bon Marché was founded in Paris in 1838 to sell lace, ribbons, sheets, mattresses, buttons, umbrellas and other assorted goods. It originally had four departments, twelve employees, and a floor space of three hundredsquare meters. The entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut became a partner in 1852, and changed the marketing plan, instituting fixed prices and guarantees that allowed exchanges and refunds, advertising, and a much wider variety of merchandise. The use of fixed prices replaced the system of haggling over prices, then commonly used in dry goods stores. The annual income of the store increased from 500,000 francs in 1852 to five million in 1860. In 1869 he built a much larger building at 24 rue de Sèvres on the Left Bank, and enlarged the store again in 1872, with help from the engineering firm of Gustave Eiffel, creator of the Eiffel Tower. The income rose from twenty million francs in 1870 to 72 million at the time of Boucicaut's death in 1877, at which time the management of the store continued by his wife, Marguerite Boucicaut. The floor space had increased from three hundred square meters in 1838 to fifty thousand, and the number of employees had increased from twelve in 1838 to 1,788 in 1879. Boucicaut was famous for his marketing innovations; a reading room for husbands while their wives shopped; extensive newspaper advertising; entertainment for children; and six million catalogs sent out to customers. By 1880 half the employees were women; unmarried women employees lived in dormitories on the upper floors. The architecture of the store was very innovative for its time; the 1869 store was constructed by the architect Louis-Auguste Boileau. Alexandre Laplanche ornamented Boileau's ironwork technology. Louis-Charles Boileau, his son, continued the store in the 1870s, consulting the firm of Gustave Eiffel for parts of its structure. Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, the grandson of Louis-Auguste Boileau, worked on an extension to the store in the 1920s. The building inspired the design of the Bon Marche store in Sydney, designed by Arthur Anderson, as well as the Galerias Pacificoshopping centre in Buenos Aires, originally called Argentine Bon Marché.
Operations
In 1922, when the decorative arts were at their high point in France, the Pomone design and decorating department was established, following the trend of other Parisian department stores. From 1923–1928, Paul Follot was its director, followed by René-Lucien Prou and Albert-Lucien Guénot up to 1955. Today's home-furnishings inventory primarily consists of brand names but not white goods.
