Le Slip Français halved the price of its own underwear two years before it rang the bell on Euronext. In 2023 the made-in-France label cut its average product from roughly €40 to €20, trading a premium position for everyday basics, as FashionUnited reported. The question its July IPO is said to pose, whether sovereign manufacturing can hold a premium against the demand to grow, was therefore answered before a public shareholder existed. The retreat did not stop at the price tag: the store network fell from nineteen outlets at the end of 2023 to just two by April 2026, with selling moved online, per toutsurmesfinances, and the pattern was structural, not cosmetic. What listed on Euronext Growth is the story of a premium the firm had already decided to spend.

The listing raised €13 million, and most of it left the building. New shares issued for the company came to €5 million; the other €8 million was existing stock sold by the venture backers 360 Capital and Experienced Capital, per toutsurmesfinances. Those two funds, holders since 2015 and 2016, used the float to shed 73.8% of their combined stake. A capital raise is meant to fund a plan, and this one mostly funded a departure. The retail investors who subscribed were buying, in the main, the shares that early money had chosen to stop holding.

The founder stayed, which is the counterweight the story leans on. Guillaume Gibault’s holding company kept 9.46% of the capital and locked it for a year (toutsurmesfinances); he casts the listing as a way to “show by example that Made in France is efficient and competitive,” a line Reuters carried in late June and FashionUnited picked up. The claim is fair, and the company has the credentials to press it, holding B Corp status and mission-driven registration since 2020 (Euronext). The awkward part sits in the arithmetic beneath the credentials, where the price cut and the backers’ exit describe a premium already tested and found wanting. Efficiency and competitiveness, at Le Slip Français, arrived by way of a discount.

The €5 million that stays with the company shows what it is really building. About a third is earmarked for industrial capacity and the Fier(T) subsidiary, a third for marketing, and the rest for the working capital that higher volumes consume (toutsurmesfinances). The industrial share is the tell, because the aim is to make garments for other brands, not only to sell more of its own. Le Slip Français runs three French workshops: underwear and t-shirts in Aubervilliers, socks in Limoges (Euronext). Those workshops are fixed cost, and a fixed cost is defended by keeping it busy.

The asset the IPO is really underwriting is a factory — and a factory built to run at volume ends up sewing someone else’s label.


The competition, not the flag, sets the terms of that plan. Le Slip Français operates in an industry FashionUnited describes as weakened by pressure from platforms like Shein and Temu, and their advantage runs deeper than wages. Both operate a supply chain closer to software than to tailoring: tiny first batches, demand read almost in real time, reorders placed only for what sells, and little stock left stranded. A French atelier carries the opposite risk, committing thread and wages to garments before it knows they will move. Local production loses less to labour than to the guessing, and making clothes for other brands is how a workshop takes the guessing off its own books.

The scale the company has promised is small in absolute terms, which is the hard part rather than the reassuring one. Revenue reached €21.1 million in 2025 (FashionUnited), up 4.3% on the year, or 16% once revenue from closed stores is stripped out (toutsurmesfinances); the closures explain most of the headline slowdown, not softening demand. Profit returned only last year, and one clean year is thin proof that a made-in-France model scales (Le Conseil Patrimoine). Management wants to roughly double turnover by 2030 while holding operating margin above 10% (FashionUnited). Doubling revenue while lifting margin, in a range the company has priced to stay affordable, is the same tension the 2023 cut was built to resolve.

The bull case is real, and it deserves its strongest form before the objection. About 60% of French consumers recognise the brand (Le Conseil Patrimoine). It holds only around 4% of the male underwear market, so awareness could in principle convert into years of growth without cutting a single price. For the argument here to fail, that conversion has to occur at prices high enough to keep three French workshops solvent. The 2023 retreat from the premium is the company’s own evidence that, at the higher price, it was not occurring.

The valuation leaves the company little room to change its mind. At €14.80 the shares priced near 27 times last year’s earnings, a multiple that holds only if the promised doubling arrives (Le Conseil Patrimoine). Le Slip Français has already shown which lever it pulls when the premium and the growth target work against each other. It cut the price and kept the factory. What the public bought, then, is a company that has decided made-in-France cannot command a premium at scale, and has staked its next five years on selling the capacity rather than the cachet.