My name is Constance, I’m 38 years old, and I have a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter named Ada. I began my career in fashion, though my path was rather conventional at first. I started studying law. Later, I met my first husband, whose mother worked with Yves Saint Laurent. When Yves Saint Laurent stopped couture, Loulou De La Falaise started her own fashion house, and I worked with her for about 4 or 5 years.
She was almost like a fairy godmother to me. When she fell ill, I stopped working because I felt I had seen the best of what fashion had to offer. I moved to the countryside with my husband for a year or two. One day, I received a call from a friend who owned a beautiful vintage store. She was probably around 80 today. She was close friends with Azzedine Alaïa and was the biggest collector of Vionnet, Poiret... She called me with her gravelly voice and said, “Constance, I have a Lebanese man looking to hire a French woman.” I thought that was the best job description ever.
That’s how I met Rabih Kayrouz, who at the time had a fashion house in Beirut and wanted to establish himself in Paris. I spent three months in Beirut to see if we could work together and if we wanted to. We both agreed to set up a Rabih Kayrouz house in France. This story lasted for about ten years, until 2018, which was around the time I gave birth.
It was a time of upheaval: I had gotten pregnant and had recently returned to studying at Sciences Po. When you go back to school at 32, it usually means you're questioning something. That’s when I separated from Rabih.
At that time, I began working actively with my sister, Mathilde. It did me a world of good. Fashion is an industry with very small volumes and enormous margins. Suddenly, I found myself in a completely opposite universe.
The first phase with my sister was the adventure of Petit Bailly, dedicated to early childhood and maternity. She and I had both had our children around the same time. We found it incredibly difficult to navigate, even though we were naturally aware of early childhood issues thanks to our work with the pharmacy. Health was a subject we knew well, and we were likely the best people to know how to figure it out. We realized how alone we felt on this journey, so we opened Petit Bailly, which was a wild adventure.
Petit Bailly
We gathered all our expertise in parapharmacy (care, diapers, food) under one roof, offering prices that were extremely reasonable. We did a lot of volume, and upstairs, you could find strollers, cribs, car seats, baby carriers. This allowed us to provide 360° support. We sometimes assisted families from 6 months of pregnancy until the child was 3 years old. This lasted from 2018 to 2021.
It was a completely crazy experience. We realized that the need for listening and support was deeply rooted in people's intimacy. With this in mind, we should probably rethink the very business of pharmacy. One of my great friends was our shop manager. She was a lawyer, had no children, and had an incredible ability to listen. We managed to rally people around this adventure who felt truly heard. To this day, I still have clients who come to see me to ask about her because she even remembered the children's names. We were able to assist a mom at 9 p.m. at the maternity ward. We became part of people’s lives. This left a lasting impression on both my sister and me.
We also went through several crises during this period, including the yellow vests protests, strikes, and Covid... Saint Lazare became a hotspot for protests. Our windows were damaged, and we got gassed. We realized that all of this was changing the way people consumed. All this violence made people want to protect themselves and go out less.
When the pandemic hit, we were considered an essential business. We were able to continue serving and supporting our clients. At the same time, we had a plan to move the pharmacy. A pharmacy transfer is highly regulated. It takes anywhere from 12 to 24 months.
It was at this point that we decided to merge both our areas into one place: the pharmacy and our expertise in early childhood and maternity. We moved in May 2021.
We had to close Petit Bailly, which was really heartbreaking. A pharmacy is a regulated profession. It doesn’t allow you to sell all the products we could offer at Petit Bailly. But we kept that sense of listening, welcoming, and advising, which isn’t always common in pharmacies. The idea was to take advantage of this move to rethink the space, bring in more light, create better working conditions for our team, and ensure that our clients had a pleasant experience with people who would advise them intelligently. If this place could offer a little moment of decompression before people went back to their daily grind and personal problems at home, then we’d won.
La Pharmacie Bailly
We were able to completely rethink our offerings. We removed major pharmacy players that we felt no longer aligned with our image or the way we wanted to run things. It was a huge risk, but we felt it would be an even greater risk not to take it.
xtagstartzspanwork sans',sans-serif;color:#1c1b1b;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;"="">Today, we want to promote brands that do good for our clients and patients, that are cleanly formulated and made in good conditions. I believe people are truly ready to consume less and consume better. At Pharmacie Bailly, we serve customers from all walks of life—wealthy women, but also people with very different means for whom the term "beauty routine" is foreign, and who just want good products.
