Louise Carmen

Louise Carmen's origin traces to a specific trip: founder Nathalie Valmery spent a year traveling through Asia with her family, and during the journey improvised a cover for her notebooks out of a scrap of leather found in Thailand, with holes punched by a local cobbler and elastic bands threaded through to hold everything together. Back in France, she developed that improvised object into a product line, launching the Louise Carmen brand in November 2016 with her husband, Fabien Valmery. The brand's name comes from a character in a novel Nathalie had written in 2013, during that same Asia trip, rather than being a real person the brand is named after. The core product remains a leather notebook cover system, sized as Pocket, Ernest, Honore, Organizer, Roadbook and Magnum, sold in around 15 colors each, with customers able to personalize covers in person; the shop describes same-day personalization if requested before 6:15pm. The flagship boutique-atelier operates from 51 Galerie Vivienne, in the covered passage near the Palais-Royal and the Louvre, where the brand does its own leatherwork and personalization on site rather than shipping customization out.