The Garrulous Jay – The Empereurs of Marseille

If you walk about 300 metres up La Canabière from the Old Port in Marseille and turn right, you will find yourself on Rue des Récolettes. A few more paces along from here, on Rue d’Aubagne, you will come across one of France’s second city’s most unexpected landmarks.

Maison Empereur is a hardware shop, but it is no ordinary “quincaillerie”.

As the Histoire de Marseille sign on the street outside one of the store’s several shopfronts explains, it is in fact one of the oldest hardware stores in France. Established in 1827 by one Eugène Bolfras, it was shortly thereafter taken over by François Empereur, who moved it to its current premises in 1845.

Since then Maison Empereur has remained in the ownership of the same family, with the sixth generation of the original Empereur clan taking over control of the business in 2000.

Before arriving in Marseille last Wednesday we were somewhat perplexed by the fact that two different friends had recommended we pay a visit to Maison Empereur. After all a trip to one of Europe’s oldest cities, rich in culture and history, seems like an odd time to check out some pots and pans and shop for tea towels.

Nevertheless, we were delighted to find our hotel was literally next door, so it seemed churlish not to follow the advice we had been given.

Suffice to say we were not disappointed. Maison Empereur is a strange cross between Dr Who’s Tardis, a labyrinth and a 1930s department store. Rooms lead into rooms and passageways into yet more rooms, each of them stocked with an extraordinary range of products and manned by impeccably attentive and diligent staff.

So to what does this Aladdin’s Cave of an establishment owe its undoubted success?

In one of the rooms there is a spiral staircase which takes visitors up to a small, dusty museum. An in that museum is a small knee-level table with drawers half open. Inside those drawers are two small notes: one in French and one in less-than-perfectly-translated English. Here one can find the answer to the question on what is titled, The Table of the “Little Notes”.

Pictured above is the note itself, but the final two sentences bear repetition: “The only magic we ever know is you, our loyal customers. This fidelity, this closeness, this unswerving bond against which even the passing time can do nothing!”

In an age of fast fashion, automation, artificial intelligence, market and customer segmentation, specialisation, modernisation and depersonalisation, Maison Empereur succeeds by adhering to values that they recognise are timeless.

There would no doubt be retail ‘consultants’ out there who would argue that stocking over 400,000 items is commercial folly, but that would be to ignore the culture of the “little notes”.

This is not to say that this is a business stuck in the past: their website is actually pretty slick.

But it is no surprise to me that Mrs Shippam wants to go back to Maison Empereur to shop, rather than spending time on their website: that is where the magic happens.