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FANCY FRAMES

L'ECLAT DE VERRE OFFERS U.S. SHOPPERS A FRENCH TWIST ON CRAFTING

By Jesse Serwer

The frames are every bit as special as the art they surround, to hear them tell it at L'Eclat de Verre. “We are, firstly, a high-end store selling our creations, which are unique pieces of art,” said Emmanuel Teillet, the French picture-frame chain's president.

“The second activity is to sell some really custom framing, which means spending between 45 minutes and one hour with the customer to elaborate a full product. And the third is to offer classes where we teach the basic tools and elements of making a nice custom frame as well as cartonnage, a technique using cardboard papers to make decorative items for the home.”

L'Eclat de Verre (French for “shard of glass”), founded in 1975 in the wealthy Paris suburb of Versailles, has become synonymous with French framing, a combination of traditional 18th century precision and modern techniques for the creative use of matting materials. Artists, interior designers, gallery owners and anyone looking merely to spice up the home all flock to the shop, where they are encouraged to turn everything from photographs to articles of clothing into customized wall decorations, using combinations of some 500 handmade papers and other materials that are exclusive to the store.

Thanks in no small part to L'Eclat de Verre's “framing academy,” French framing has grown into a popular hobby in France. “Instead of painting or scrapbooking or any other craft activity, you can frame,” said Teillet, whose GL Group acquired L'Eclat from its original owners, the Lemonnier family, in 2004. Teillet estimates that some 60,000 people have taken private or group lessons since the Versailles flagship began offering them, around 1980.

Having grown from just 29 stores in 2004 to its current European total of 40 (including two in Belgium and one in Luxembourg), L'Eclat is now hoping to make an even bigger splash in the U.S. The company opened its first stateside shop in January at Cady's Alley, a hub for high-end home furnishings stores such as Design Within Reach and Artefacto in Washington's tony Georgetown district.

L'Eclat, which posted some $23 million in net sales last year, plans to open two or three more stores in metro Washington — if the Georgetown store meets sales projections — probably in Chevy Chase or Bethesda, Md., or at Tysons Corner, in McLean, Va., Teillet says. “Washington is an international city with a strong French presence, [and there is a] density of wealthy and educated people, which means also a lot of art to be framed,” Teillet said of the decision to enter the U.S. through its capital. “If everything goes well, our plan is to then go north to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. We have [about] 40 stores across France, which is more or less the [size] of California, so we think between 50 and 200 stores in the U.S. is about right.”

But L'Eclat will have to win Americans over to French framing by drawing attention to the differences between its own product and the offerings of thousands of custom framing shops, mostly mom-and-pop shops, throughout the U.S., Teillet says. To that end, it is important for all future L'Eclat stores to be in highly visible areas with plenty of foot and car traffic, he says.

“It is also important to be coherent, like Cady's Alley, which is a design center with many high-end stores for furniture and lights,” Teillet said. “I don't care if we are beside [other] framers. I think competition is very good and [will] help us.”

“Major shopping districts or lifestyle centers surrounded by affluent residential density, whether urban or suburban, will be the right fit,” said W. Alexander Walker, a vice president of Transwestern Retail, L'Eclat's broker in the Cady's Alley deal. “I think L'Eclat de Verre's quality and craftsmanship will be recognized by customers looking for more than just a neighborhood frame shop, which can set the stage for strong growth in strategic U.S. markets.”

With its exposed brick walls and lofted ceilings, the 4,500-square-foot Georgetown store has the aesthetics and spaciousness of a bohemian art gallery, making it a far cry from the cluttered arts-and-crafts and frame shops Americans are used to. “We have a big gallery full of paper with different kinds of textures, colors, patterns,” said Caitlin Allen, manager of the U.S. store. “Most people pick between two and four. [French framing] is more creative and more of a personal expression — you're building even more art around the piece of art that you want to frame. I don't want to say we don't have any competition, but this kind of framing is not in the United States at all.”

One novel concept on display in Georgetown is a framed flat-screen TV screen. “Everybody seems to think it's a great idea,” Allen said. “It's up on your wall, so it's really another piece of artwork.” Ticket prices in the store are between $200 and $300, though customers can spend as little as $20 for a frame or as much as $2,000 for a complex custom-framing job.

The median age of L'Eclat customers in France, 75 percent of whom are women, is 50. The Georgetown store customers are female in about the same proportion, though they tend to be slightly younger. “I've noticed mostly women coming in,” said Allen. “Locals stumble across our shop, then come back a week later with a lot of things to frame. Our hope is they'll learn how to do it and want to buy the supplies to do this at home, and it will pick up, the way scrapbooking did in the U.S. You can come in with a photograph or postcards and we'll show you how to pick each paper and how to do it, step by step.”

L'Eclat is also weighing expansion into Japan, where it already does a sizable mail-order business. “Japan has a very long and old culture of papers,” he said. “They love what we do. Every year we receive groups of people who take a 24-hour plane ride from Tokyo to Versailles just to come to take some classes in L'Eclat de Verre.”