Furet Du Nord

''Furet du Nord'' is a chain of bookstores in the Nord department of France. Its origins date back to 1936 when a fur store located on ''Rue de la Vieille-Comédie'' in Lille was transformed into a bookstore. It retained its name, referring to a local tradition: rabbit hunting with ferrets.

Today, the flagship store is located in Lille on the Grand Place. It was established in 1959 and was the largest bookstore in the world from 1992 to 1999. It is still one of the largest bookshops in France.

History

''Furet du Nord'' was originally a fur shop located on ''Rue de la Vieille-Comédie'' in Lille. High school principal Georges Poulard transformed the fur shop into a bookstore in 1936. Despite the nature of the business changing, the new owner decided to keep the original name, ''Furet du Nord''.

In 1947, Paul Callens began working at ''Furet du Nord''. He had a passion for books despite coming from a family where his father, a butcher in Tourcoing, did not understand or indulge in his passion. Dissatisfied with his position as a salesman and the shop's size, Callens wanted to purchase the shop despite not having enough money. Later in 1950, he told his dreams of buying the bookshop to his dairymaid friend, Florence, who took a tin box from the cellar wrapped in a newspaper containing her savings. Callens bought the bookstore with the savings the next day. While at a café, Callens heard that Galleries Barbès was closing their furniture store on the Place du Général-de-Gaulle in Lille, and he had the idea of moving ''Furet'' there. There were other contenders for the location such as the Renault company, so Callens made his first trip to Paris to plead his case with the management of ''Galleries Barbès''. He convinced the management with plans for his bookstore, and it opened on 1 August 1959. It initially had a space of 20 m² which later expanded to 600 m². Its grand opening was in 1960. ''Furet du Nord'' became the first self-service bookstore and was also the first bookstore in France to open a department of pocketbooks in the basement in 1963; a youth department was built in the basement in 1970.

In 1982, Paul Callens' family business became a public company and began to open other stores in the area. ''Furet du Nords area expanded from 500 m² to 7,000 m² between the years of 1982 to 1992. Today, it hosts an average of 12,000 daily visitors. In 1996, ''Furet du Nord'' opened its first online bookstore. The site now offers 350,000 French language references. ''Furet du Nord'' is now owned by Extrapole, a chain of multimedia cultural stores, and its shareholder '' Lagardère Services'', acquired in July 1999.

In the summer of 2001, ''Lagardère'' (formerly Hachette Distribution Services) acquired the French network of Virgin Megastores and became the second-largest French group that specialized in distributing cultural products (ahead of the French group Pinault Printemps Redoute). Due to regional fame, ''Furet du Nord'' retained its name. At the beginning of November 2007, Lagardère announced that it was in exclusive negotiations with the French investment fund Butler Capital Partners (BCP). At the end of November, the works council unanimously accepted the change of the main shareholding, with the acquisition of a stake of about 80% in the Virgin/''Furet'' investment fund. The same month, the group announced that the bookstore located in ''Boulogne-sur-Mer'' since 1990 was to close at the end of January 2008. In the summer of 2008, two subsidiaries of the regional bank of Crédit Agricole in ''Nord de France'', Vauban Partners (Paris) and Participex Gestion (Lille) took control of the capital. This operation made it possible to repay the debt (€15 million) and contributed €10 million in equity.

Starting with the separation from Virgin Megastores, ''Furet du Nord'' changed its commercial strategy. On 15 October 2009, Furet launche
furet.com
and began distributing more than a million books on the Web. In mid-September 2010, the eleventh bookstore opened in the ''Englos-les-Géants'' shopping centre. In June 2011, a new boutique opened in Cité Europe in Coquelles, near Calais. At the end of October 2011, the first ''Furet du Nord'' bookstore outside the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region opened; it was in the ''La Vache-Noire'' shopping centre, in Arcueil, south of Paris. The brand continued its expansion in the shopping centres of ''Île-de-France'' by settling in that of ''Le Kremlin-Bicêtre'', named Okabé, 16 October 2012. In 2013, the brand returned to Dunkerque

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