Le Tanneur

Le Tanneur traces its founding to 1898, when Lyon leatherworker Charles Bonnardel joined with Francisque Bornex, a tanner from a three-generation Belley family business in the Ain department. Their first product, a wallet called the Sans Couture, replaced traditional stitching with rivets for extra durability - an innovation recognized with a medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The partners built a factory in Belley employing around 70 workers and opened two boutiques on the Grand Boulevards in Paris, with the company's first newspaper advertisements appearing in the Journal des Bazars in July 1907. The house kept collecting recognition, including a gold medal at the 1914 Lyon international exhibition, and passed to new leadership under Guillaume Gianinetto in 1923. In the 1960s it added watch boxes and jewelry cases to its range; in 1963, during a visit to Belley, General de Gaulle received a Le Tanneur leather desk set and jewelry box. The brand diversified into school goods with the TANN's line in 1978, and in 2019 introduced the Madeleine collection, manufactured entirely in France. For its 125th anniversary in 2023 it opened a small museum inside its Paris showroom. Today Le Tanneur still makes the Sans Couture wallet and runs multiple boutiques across Paris - including Boulevard des Capucines, Rue de Passy and Rue de Sevres - plus corners in Galeries Lafayette and Printemps Haussmann and stores in other French cities.