The first thing Corinne Abadie-Larsen did after buying the Filature Beauvallon was switch everything off. For three weeks, the looms stood silent while she walked the floor with the eleven remaining weavers, asking each of them to explain, machine by machine, what went wrong and why. She filled four notebooks. The mill, founded in 1887 on the banks of the Rhône south of Lyon, had been losing money for two decades, and its previous owners had concluded that the only thing left to sell was the building.
Abadie-Larsen, then thirty-eight, had spent her career in logistics software, most recently running operations for a freight startup in Hamburg. She knew nothing about silk. What she knew, she says, was how to listen to people who had been ignored for a long time. The weavers told her the jacquard looms were not the problem. They were superb machines. The problem was that nobody could predict when a warp would break, and every break cost half a day.
Software written on the floor
Rather than replace the looms, she wired them. Working with two engineers who agreed to move to the Rhône valley on a promise and a modest salary, she fitted each machine with inexpensive sensors that listen to vibration and tension. The software that interprets the data was written on the mill floor, in the weavers' own vocabulary, with alerts named after the faults they had been describing for years. Within eighteen months, unplanned stoppages fell by two-thirds. Within three years, the mill was profitable.
The numbers, though, are not what visitors remember. What they remember is the atmosphere. Beauvallon now employs forty-six people, including nine apprentices recruited from local schools, and every one of them can read the dashboards that hang above the looms. Senior weavers teach the engineers; engineers teach the apprentices to code. Abadie-Larsen eats lunch in the canteen every day and keeps no office, working instead from a battered table at the end of the dyeing hall.
I did not rescue this mill. The weavers had already worked out everything that was wrong with it. My only job was to believe them, and then to raise the money. — Corinne Abadie-Larsen
Her clients include several of the most demanding couture ateliers in Paris and Milan, which buy Beauvallon's silk faille and cloqué for their evening collections. They pay a premium, she says, not for nostalgia but for reliability: a bolt ordered for March arrives in March. She is wary of being held up as a symbol of romantic European manufacturing, and speaks with some impatience about founders who talk of heritage while outsourcing the actual work.
What comes next is expansion, cautiously. Abadie-Larsen has bought a second, smaller mill in the Ardèche and plans to open a weaving school there within two years. She is also, unusually, publishing the mill's monitoring software for free, so that other struggling workshops can use it. Asked whether that is a sensible business decision, she shrugs. The looms of the Rhône valley, she says, are worth more running than as museum pieces, even if some of them end up running for her competitors.
