Galeries Lafayette more than ever controlled by founding family

Reckoning at the highest level?

That Nicolas Houzé (38) gets the seat of CEO
comes as no surprise: he has been deputy director since 2012 of the branch “Grands
Magasins” of Groupe Galeries Lafayette. The speed and especially the way the
departure of Delaoutre was handled (from one day to the next, and with a simple
diktat), do raise a few eyebrows in Paris: sales of the company rose by one
third during the reign of Delaoutre, despite critics who thought the concept of
luxury warehouses to be dead and buried.

According to the French media chairman
Phillippe Houzé and especially his mother-in-law Ginette Moulin (heir of
founder Théophile Bader) were quite displeased with the sale of Monoprix to Casino, especially as Lafayette probably will not be getting
hold of its competitor Le Printemps. That company will probably fall in to the
hands of a state fund from Qatar, which supposedly also made an offer on Marks
& Spencer. The duo is looking at Delaoutre to take the fall.

All power with the family

Whatever of it, father and son Houzé
now have total control of the Groupe Galeries Lafayette. The new CEO got his MBA at the prestigious Insead
Business School in Fontainebleau and started his career with A.T. Kearney and
Deutsche Bank, before taking a job at Monoprix in 1998.

There he launched Monop’ in 2003, a
chain of smaller neighbourhood shops where customers can get a bite to eat and something
to drink. Three years later Houzé became junior chairman of Louis Pion-Royal
Quartz, the wristwatch branch of the group. In January of last year he became
deputy director of “Grands Magazins”, more than ever the most important branch
of Groupe Galeries Lafayette.