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There are two of us: Mathieu and Lucille. We supply the millinery and tailoring trades with materials, haberdashery and tools, and our workshop works for brands, from prototype to small production runs.
Here is how we got here.
2017
A website
At the time we were tailoring students, buying our supplies in Paris shops. The quality was there. Two things, however, bothered us.
First: you had to be in Paris, in person, during opening hours. Outside the capital, getting hold of the same supplies turned into an expedition.
Second: prices were displayed nowhere. We wanted the exact opposite — a public price, visible before ordering, and the same for everyone.
We opened the Mercerie de l'Atelier website on those two principles. The first catalogue was all tailoring: what we handled every day, sold in small quantities, shipped anywhere, at a displayed price.
2019
Millinery
Lucille trained as a milliner. What was meant to be a sideline became a direction.
Millinery raised the same problem as tailoring in 2017, only sharper: materials are rare, suppliers few, and nothing is set up for the craftsperson ordering a single piece. We added the range.
2021
Premises of our own
We were working in a 50 m² flat in Paris. For tailoring it just about held; with millinery and stock, not at all. We had been looking for premises for a year.
In early 2021 we left Paris for Tergnier, in Hauts-de-France. At last, room to grow.
That move made everything else possible: far more items in stock, and services we simply could not have considered before.
2022
The contract workshop
We opened the workshop to brands: from prototype to small runs. Many houses want a hat in their collection without having the craft in-house. We bring it.
2025
Labs10
From 2021, one request kept coming back: blocks. The few blockmakers still working are swamped. Lead times run into months, sometimes more — and a workshop waiting for a block is a workshop not producing.
In 2025 we became an official reseller for Labs10, a French maker of tools for craftspeople. That solves the lead time — and more.
Grading is exact. A block in size 52 is rigorously the same as in 64: same volume, same curve, same character. You design a model once and produce it in every size, without reworking or correcting it from one size to the next.
Nothing gets lost. Every block exists as a 3D file at the maker's. Five years on, it is remade identically: you neither send the original back nor halt production during a round trip. A damaged, lent or lost block no longer strikes a model off your collection.
One month. That is the stated manufacturing lead time.
Then there is price. A block is a tool: built to take steam, knocks and years of work. Labs10 holds a high manufacturing standard at tool prices — not display-piece prices.
2026
A new website
The 2017 one had had its day. We rebuilt it entirely, starting again from the original question: what still stops someone from reaching our products?
In 2017 the answer was geography. In 2026 it is language. The site now exists in nine languages — French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. A milliner in Seoul or Lisbon orders in her own.
Every product page can be listened to: the text is read aloud, paragraph by paragraph. Useful to anyone who struggles with a screen, and to anyone whose hands are busy working.
Then there is not being able to touch. A block is judged from every side, and two photographs will not do. Blocks can now be handled in 3D in the browser, from any angle you like.
Three services arrive with this site:
Custom labels. Your labels, in your name, in your quantities.
Workshop hire. Our workshop opens for hire, for the length of a project, to those without a workshop or who need ours.
Hat block rental. In preparation. A block is sometimes used twice in a workshop's lifetime: nothing says you have to buy it.
What has not changed since 2017
We only sell what we use. The catalogue stays deliberately tight: every item was used in the workshop before going online.
We still sell in small quantities, at a displayed price, anywhere. An established milliner, a couture house, a school or someone starting out at home do not have the same volumes — they are entitled to the same materials at the same price.
Mathieu & Lucille