The first name on the website was a ladder. MonEchelle.fr went live in June 2013 and sold what its name promised, plus about 30,000 other things for people who fix their own homes. The company behind it was not called MonEchelle at all. On paper it was Colibri SAS, registered in Paris in July 2012 with 150,000 euros.
The two men behind it, Christian Raisson and Philippe de Chanville, had both gone through EDHEC business school. Raisson was not a lifelong tool person. His earlier jobs were at Deloitte, the consumer guide Guide Malin and the restaurant guide Gault Millau, a long way from drills and paint. What he and de Chanville spotted was a gap: DIY shopping in France was fragmented, and nobody online offered a deep catalogue to the amateur on a Saturday morning.
What almost nobody remembers is how fast investors followed the expansion.
Money came in small pieces. Business angels put in 300,000 euros in 2013. The historic shareholders added 150,000 more the next February, and about two million followed that September. That is a thin runway for a marketplace that has to win both sellers and shoppers. Then came the decision that mattered: in September 2015 they dropped the ladder and renamed the company ManoMano, a name that worked in Spanish and Italian as well as French. Spain and Italy opened that year, the UK in early 2016, Germany that November.
What almost nobody remembers is how fast investors followed the expansion. Thirteen million euros came in March 2016, then 60 million from General Atlantic in 2017, then 110 million, then 125 million with Temasek in early 2020. By the end of 2020 the site claimed 1.2 billion euros of business volume and seven million active customers. In July 2021 a 355 million dollar round valued it at about 2.6 billion dollars.
The bill arrived later. In October 2023 the company announced a restructuring with a plan to cut 230 jobs. Customer service moved to Madagascar and Portugal. Press investigations alleged that the platform encouraged fake positive reviews, which ManoMano denied, and freelance advisers took the company to court over their status.
In April 2026, after more than a decade, the two founders stepped back from daily operations and Loic Derrien became chief executive.
The lesson is hiding in the first week: a name is cheap to change and a business is not. They launched with a clumsy brand, learned fast, and changed the one thing that blocked growth before they spent real money on it.