In 1996 a stock-clearance dealer bought a newspaper's old factory. Jacques-Antoine Granjon, then in his mid-thirties, paid for the former printing works of Le Monde in Plaine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris, a cavernous building that had once turned out the country's most serious daily. He would use it to store other people's unsold clothes.
Granjon was born in Marseille in 1962 and raised in Paris, where he went to the Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague before the European Business School. At EBS he met Julien Sorbac. In 1985, the year Granjon graduated, the two friends started a wholesale company, Cofotex, reselling surplus stock. It was a trade of back rooms, phone calls and cash, and it lasted close to twenty years.
Granjon, known for long hair and a casual manner, told one interviewer that long and clean beats short and dirty.
What almost nobody saw coming was that the dull trade would become the foundation of an internet company. Brands hated clearance sales; discounting in public cheapened them. Granjon knew that from the inside. In early 2000, with a quarter-century of destocking behind him, he and Sorbac conceived a private online sale: members only, a few days, then gone. Vente-privee.com opened on 30 January 2001, with seven associates alongside him.
The first years were slow. The site was an investment, not a hit. The turn came in 2004, with a sale for a well-known lingerie brand that showed labels could trust the format and shoppers would queue for it. By 2007 the American fund Summit Partners had bought 20 percent. Granjon, known for long hair and a casual manner, told one interviewer that long and clean beats short and dirty.
Growth brought noise. In 2013 a Paris court ruled the vente-privee.com trademark partly void, a decision reversed on appeal in 2015. Between 2016 and 2018 the consumer authority investigated the firm over reference prices, a case the company contests. A 2011 American venture with American Express never took root.
Still, the machine kept turning. Acquisitions followed: two Paris theatres, a Belgian site, and in 2016 the Spanish rival Privalia. In 2019 the name became Veepee, and in 2024 the group reported €3.2 billion in sales including VAT. Challenges estimated Granjon's fortune at about €1.3 billion in July 2026.
The quiet lesson sits in that old printing plant. Granjon did not abandon his unglamorous first business to chase a new idea. He used what it taught him, the pain of brands and the habits of bargain hunters, as the raw material. The best opportunity may be the one you have been standing beside for twenty years.