RougeGorge Lingerie: Lessons in Leadership From Catherine Gallais

A Seventeen-Year Tenure That Defied the Fashion Calendar

In an industry where creative directors and chief executives can come and go as quickly as seasonal collections, Catherine Gallais’s seventeen years at the helm of RougeGorge Lingerie stand out as a genuine anomaly. She admits the time slipped past almost unnoticed, explaining that the sheer pace of change made each year feel new.

She handed over the chief executive role to Elya Hasson on 1 October 2026. The business she leaves behind is a substantial one: more than 235 stores across France and Belgium, roughly 1,000 employees, and consumer turnover of 120 million euros. It is a northern French success story built on consistency, and when asked to choose the moment that best sums up her time in charge, she points not to a triumphant launch or a record year, but to a calculated risk taken at the very start: renaming the brand.

Turning a Legal Constraint Into a Shared Project

When she took over in May 2009, the company was still trading as Cannelle. It had been founded in 1992 as Phildar Lingerie, operated 130 points of sale, and was emerging from a flat 2009 under mounting pressure from low-cost rivals. Legal reasons meant the name had to be abandoned altogether.

She is quick to correct any assumption that this was the vanity project of a newly appointed leader. Changing a brand name, she points out, is genuinely risky. Instead of treating the obligation as a setback, she used it to bring the organisation together around a common purpose. The transition was prepared collectively with the teams and paired with a wider overhaul of visual identity, communications and the product range. Stores began trading as RougeGorge Lingerie in 2010, and she describes that switch as the foundation stone of everything that followed.

The name itself was not her invention. She had hoped for something short and internationally usable, but a graphic design agency and a staff vote settled the matter differently. Red, as she puts it, speaks of womanhood and passion, while “gorge” refers to the bust. Her conclusion is disarmingly simple: a name on its own means very little; what matters is the personality a company gives it.

An Unusual Route to the Top

Her career path is far from the standard retail template. Leadership in fashion more commonly comes from finance or marketing, yet she arrived via human resources. A Sciences Po graduate, she first encountered retail at Auchan while funding her studies, and was subsequently hired there. She spent more than two decades with the business in HR roles, before joining Pimkie in 2005 as international HR director and later managing its North-West region.

She freely acknowledges that both her longevity in the role and her background make her atypical. Yet she rejects the idea that an HR grounding is a limitation. Reading a profit-and-loss statement, she notes, is second nature to anyone from that discipline, and she genuinely enjoys working with numbers. In her view, the chief executive’s real job is to conduct the orchestra rather than to be the finest instrumentalist in it. She is also generous in crediting those who backed her, recalling people who trusted her beyond the usual boxes, and she speaks warmly of the human values and long-term entrepreneurial outlook of the Mulliez Family Association ecosystem in which RougeGorge operates.

A Provincial Network Built for Omnichannel

During her tenure the store estate grew from 130 outlets to around 236. The brand’s identity is deliberately rooted in the regions: a company from the provinces, she says, which is not the same as being provincial, because it maintains strong ties with a great many local stores. Roughly 55 per cent of outlets are directly owned and 45 per cent are run by affiliates, covering medium-sized towns and shopping centres.

When e-commerce launched in 2013, it was built on omnichannel principles from day one. Owned stores and affiliates alike are assessed and rewarded on total turnover, so digital and physical retail are never set against each other. That decision, she argues, is what allowed online sales to grow so strongly.

Staying close to the ground has always mattered to her. Alongside regular store visits, for the past decade she has held a direct meeting every two months with a committee of regional managers drawn from each area. She describes this frankly as bypassing the chain of command, a deliberate way of catching weak signals early. Every new store manager also spends three days at head office and dines with the chief executive, a tradition she maintained throughout her seventeen years.

Making Commitment Tangible

Over time the company’s purpose crystallised into supporting femininity in its free expression, with the stated ambition of becoming a brand and a business more committed to women. That intent has taken concrete forms: a post-operative collection first launched in 2017, backing for a Lille-based association campaigning against violence, and a RougeGorge prize recognising a female entrepreneur. In 2024 the group also took control of Elia, a young French brand of menstrual underwear sold through pharmacies.

Inside the business, she created a role dedicated to social and societal engagement around 2020, and every head office employee is expected to give working time to a charitable cause once a year. Commitments on paper, she insists, are worth little unless people can genuinely live them out, with real evidence to show for it.

A Curator’s Eye, Not a Designer’s

Although she never designed a collection herself, she guarded their coherence fiercely. Confronted with new products, she set aside personal taste and asked instead whether an item matched the brand’s positioning, including its unusually wide size range, which was a genuine operational challenge. Her guiding rule was that a garment must enhance the wearer rather than caricature her. Her teams marked her departure by sending her videos gently mocking her famous rejections, complete with the refrain that Catherine would never approve that particular photograph.

What Comes Next

There is no retirement in the plan. She intends to split her time between board positions, mentoring young entrepreneurs through networks in the Nord region, and charitable work, arguing firmly that female entrepreneurship still needs backing and visibility.

On the question of longevity, her conviction is clear: stability at the top gives a company robustness, so long as it never hardens into immobility. She adds, with a laugh, that her teams would confirm she was never particularly stable by nature.