Mad Lords, the success of the most secret jewelry shop in Paris
Anne-Sophie Mallard
- March 15 2021
If many concept stores directly suffer from the absence of tourists, one of them is spared and even expands its empire during this crisis by opening a new store in Deauville.
The first time we met Caroline and Serge Muller, the two founders of Mad Lords, it was a few years ago in Las Vegas during the Couture Show, a very popular jewelry fair. Discreet and efficient, the duo who created Mad Lords in 2012, were ordering from their future fetish creators and designers. At that time, the store Colette was still the head of the Parisian scene and Net-A-Porter had just started to sell fine jewelry online. Since then, the has dramatically changed, some of the big players of the sector disappearing and other showing a dramatic lack of profitability.
Mad Lords has never known any difficulty. And yet, for a jewelry neophyte, having installed the shop in a hidden courtyard of rue Saint-Honoré and accumulating a hundred of designers with a wide range of price, up to 150,000 euros, could be one. So, how to understand this mad Lords paradox?
The perfect match
“We are quite unconventional and atypical, says Serge Muller. Mad Lords is not indexed to growth, trends or any aspect of the world over which we have no control.” No matter how busy the street is or if the shops are open on Sundays, the boutique has its own ecosystem. This nonconformism is the essence of their identity. Serge Muller hasn’t done anything like everyone else and is proud of it. Former head of finance, he turned to the jewelry industry overnight.
« I wanted to build a project around the idea of tribes. I now realize that Mad Lords embodies an idea, a certain form of freedom”, he continued. “There is this sanitized area of Place Vendôme with famous people. We don’t come from this world, we are UFOs and we bring a kind of freshness.”
Face of this community that oscillates on the rock and hippie chic spectrum, the heartfelt family of the two founders who has trusted them since the beginning of Mad Lords (Jacquie Aiche or Maor Cohen). Now, lots of new designers become instantly faithful, like the Turkish designer Kismet by Milka who we met during a negotiation with Caroline Muller for a future four hands project.
Because the other secret of Mad Lords, is that the two thinking heads of the store never stop working. Their network and their projects, as the new store in Deauville and maybe a future one in Saint-Tropez, but above all, the customers who give them “carte blanche”. “We don’t do unpersonal sales at Mad Lords, we constantly take our clients by the hand and try to find out what they want. We try to tell them stories”, he adds. And Mad Lords has a lot of story-telling.
As an example, the hermit guru who only creates talisman jewelry for Mad Lords and its eponymous line.
“Mad Lords is not a concept store or a showroom, it is a place to exchange ideas.” As a result, young designers who barely started like Sibylle von Münster are surprised by the number of sales they make. Moreover, some clients who order surprising one-of-a-kind pieces from artists like Sevan Biçakçi, agreeing not to know how the final jewel will look like. This proves that nothing is a constraint in the world created by Caroline and Serge Muller.
