Paris Brand Guidelines: The 1900 Santiago Furniture Shop That Became Cencosud’s Store

A furniture shop in a city of 300,000.

Paris began in Santiago in 1900 as a furniture shop. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a 2005 entry, says its founder, José María Couso, was a Spaniard who had lived in Chile before, came back and opened the store in a city of about 300,000 people. The shop had five employees at first. It took the name Paris and, according to the same entry, sold Italian furniture copied from French models, which was soon replaced by copies made by local craftsmen. Spanish Wikipedia gives the shop’s first name as Mueblería París, “París furniture store.”

The founder handed the business to his family early. The Directory says Couso sold it to his son-in-law, Antonio Gálmez, in 1910; Spanish Wikipedia’s timeline gives 1919, when Couso retired and his sons-in-law formed a partnership, Landea, Santos y Gálmez. Both sources agree that the Gálmez family then ran the business, and the Directory says the family stayed in charge through the rest of the twentieth century.

The range grew in steps. After furniture came rugs, tapestries, mattresses and bedding, the Directory says, then glassware, china, cutlery and bathroom goods, and finally clothing, which became the main department. Spanish Wikipedia ties that change to a building: the store on the Alameda, Santiago’s main avenue, at the corner of San Antonio, whose first stage opened in 1940 and which was completed in 1949. That year, it says, a clothing department opened and the furniture shop became Almacenes París, the department store; English Wikipedia dates the new name to 1950.

For decades that single building was the business. The Directory notes that the Alameda store, built before anyone planned for cars, solved its parking problem through an arrangement with a neighbouring hotel.

Plaza Lyon, the stock exchange and Cencosud.

Paris left the city centre in 1983, opening a store at Plaza Lyon in Providencia, in premises that Spanish Wikipedia says had been occupied by Gala-Sears. In 1991 it opened in two Santiago shopping malls, Parque Arauco and Plaza Vespucio, in stores formerly run by the department store Muricy, and in 1994 it added Plaza Oeste, the Directory says. Its first store outside Santiago, at Plaza del Trébol in Concepción, opened in 1996 by the Directory’s account and in 1995 by Spanish Wikipedia’s.

In 1996 the company went public, selling 30 percent of its shares on the Santiago stock exchange, the Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago. At that point, according to the Directory, the chain had seven department stores and concentrated on middle-income shoppers, and it was building stakes in new shopping malls where it planned to trade, including Plaza del Trébol and Plaza Oeste. In 1998 it bought the two Chilean stores of the American chain J.C. Penney, and it signed an agreement with the Spanish department store El Corte Inglés to sell travel services together; Spanish Wikipedia names the joint business Viajes El Corte Inglés-París. English Wikipedia says the company was a member of the International Association of Department Stores from 2000 to 2005.

For its centenary, the Directory says, the company commissioned a 22-storey headquarters, Torre Paris, in Providencia, with a curved glass façade shaped like a ship’s bow to make the most of a small triangular site. By 2002 it had 16 stores.

The ownership then changed twice in a few months. In August 2004 the Gálmez family sold a controlling stake of 52.4 percent to an investment vehicle representing the holding company Quiñenco, the insurer Consorcio and Jorge Gálmez, a great-grandson of the founder, according to the Directory. In February 2005 Cencosud, the retail group of Horst Paulmann that already owned the Jumbo and Santa Isabel supermarket chains, made a tender offer for all the shares; Quiñenco and Consorcio, backed by the property company Parque Arauco, answered with a higher counter-offer, and Cencosud raised its bid. The deal closed in mid-March 2005, largely as an exchange of shares, the Directory says, and Almacenes Paris ceased to be a listed company.

Design and documentation.

The department stores of Mexico and Chile are big, city-centre and shopping-mall businesses, and their identities are carried as much by buildings as by logos. Two of the oldest, Liverpool and El Palacio de Hierro, began as nineteenth-century clothing and fabric shops in the historic centre of Mexico City, and Liverpool’s corporate history page still traces the chain back to that first shop of 1847 and lists, year by year, its moves into shopping centres and other cities.

Store naming is often plain description or a borrowed place. El Palacio de Hierro, according to English Wikipedia, took its name from the iron-and-steel building that rose in the 1880s; Liverpool, Spanish Wikipedia says, was named after the English port its imported goods were shipped from. Branches then take the name of the district or mall they anchor, so a shopper meets the brand as “Liverpool Insurgentes” or “Liverpool Polanco,” and Spanish Wikipedia writes of “Palacio Polanco.”

The flagship façade does a great deal of the work. Downtown stores keep their early buildings, and newer flagships are built as architecture in their own right — El Palacio de Hierro’s Polanco store, reopened in 2015, has floors themed on districts of the city. Seasonal campaigns are just as visible: El Financiero has described Liverpool’s recurring Venta Nocturna sales, held over two or three days several times a year, and the Christmas tree that El Palacio de Hierro raises in front of its Polanco store with a luxury partner: Dior in 2025 and Swarovski in 2026.

Store cards carrying the chain’s name are part of the picture too: El Financiero notes that Liverpool pitches some sale offers to its own cardholders, though this guide does not describe the credit products themselves. Corporate pages also set out owners and listings: both Mexican groups have long been listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange, and Liverpool’s investor site carries its annual and quarterly reports beside a year-by-year history.

From Almacenes Paris to Paris.

Under Cencosud the chain dropped “Almacenes” from its name and became simply Paris, trading through a company called París S.A., Spanish Wikipedia says. It shares offices with its parent beside the Alto Las Condes mall in Santiago. Since 2010, according to the same source, it has staged the París Parade, a Christmas parade of giant balloons along the Alameda; its advertising faces have included Cara Delevingne, signed in 2015, and Kendall Jenner, in 2016.

The chain also went abroad, and came back. Its first Peruvian store opened in Arequipa in 2013, Spanish Wikipedia says. In June 2020 Cencosud announced that it was leaving Peru, where Paris then had 11 stores, because the business had not reached the results it needed, Diario Financiero reported in December 2020. In the same month Cencosud said that part of its Johnson chain, bought in 2011, would be turned into Paris stores and the rest closed; the first three conversions, at Portal El Llano, Talcahuano and San Felipe, were made in December 2020 under the name Paris Express, the paper reported.

The original building did not survive the change. In January 2021 BioBioChile reported that the Paris store on the Alameda at San Antonio would close on 29 January after 72 years of trading. Cencosud told the broadcaster that the business was moving towards a more digital model and that it would keep a single store in central Santiago, on Calle Bandera, which it would refurbish.

Its name, borrowed from the French capital for a Santiago furniture shop, has outlasted the family that ran it and the company that listed it.

For a design guide, Paris shows how a store name can travel from a single building to a national chain under three kinds of owner. Compare Falabella, another Santiago department-store group, and Ripley, another Chilean department-store chain. For this guide we use an ink blue and a brick with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Paris’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.