In 1948, following World War II, Jean Cassegrain established the Longchamp brand.
Having inherited 'Au Sultan', the family-owned tobacco store located on one of the 'grands boulevards' in Paris, Jean Cassegrain saw the business flourish with the sale of pipes to Allied soldiers after France’s Liberation. A true visionary, he conceived the idea of having them covered with leather by the capital’s finest craftsmen. These leather-covered pipes, transformed into luxury items unavailable anywhere else, renewed and retained customer interest. Jean Cassegrain et Compagnie was founded to sell them under the Longchamp brand. Since the Cassegrain brand name was already being used by a cousin, Jean Cassegrain drew his inspiration for the new name from the etymology of the French word for mill (casse-grain) and one of the last remaining in Paris, located at the end of the Longchamp racetrack. Already well-known and easy to pronounce in every language, Longchamp was the perfect brand name for his leather-covered products.
60 years later, Longchamp stands alongside a host of major luxury brands on the famous Rue Saint-Honoré, but remains a family-owned business. When Jean Cassegrain passed away in 1972, his children (Philippe, Jean-François, Brigitte and Dominique) took over the business in which they had already been very active. Today, Philippe Cassegrain, CEO of Longchamp, is surrounded by his wife and his own children at the helm of the company, which now employs 1,650 people and sells its products through over 100 Longchamp stores and 2,000 other points of sale.
An ambassador of French luxury craftsmanship the world over. Since its creation, the Longchamp brand has secured its success through sales in foreign markets. Indeed, the first articles – the famous leather-covered pipes – were sold in the PX stores that supplied American military bases around the world, and this international presence has grown exponentially over time. Sold to a trendsetting international clientele at airports since the early 1960s, Longchamp has also been among the avant-garde of French brands in Japan since the 1950s, before branching out to the rest of Asia and the United States. The first Longchamp store was opened in Hong Kong in 1979, nine years before the first French store on Rue Saint-Honoré.
This success, achieved through the company’s commercial dynamism, is above all founded on customers’ recognition of the outstanding quality of Longchamp products. Benefiting from the exceptional savoir-faire of the finest artisans, Longchamp’s meticulously crafted leather-goods have been produced since 1956 in purpose-built workshops in the Maine et Loire, a region renowned for the quality of its leatherwork. This plant was expanded in 1997 and joined by factories in Ernée, Château-Gontier, Combrée, Montournais and Rémelard, and the production force now numbers 800 people.
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