Prénatal Brand Guidelines: From a 1947 French Shop to Artsana’s Italian Baby-Store Chain

A French shop name that crossed the Alps in 1963.

Prénatal is a baby, maternity and children’s retail name with roots in France, where, according to PRG Retail Group, the first Prénatal store opened in 1947. The group says the name reached Italy in 1963, when the first Italian shop opened in Milan, and that the first stores in Spain opened in the same year. The name is now used by more than one business. This guide centres on the Italian Prénatal, the chain run by PRG Retail Group, which the dated sources cover most fully, and then sets out what happened to the Dutch stores.

The Italian business changed hands in 1996, when it joined Artsana, the company founded in Como in 1946 by Pietro Catelli and known for the Chicco brand. The Catalan newspaper Ara, in a company history published in May 2026, dated the acquisition to 1996 and described it as Artsana’s move into children’s fashion. PRG’s own timeline gives the same year, saying simply that Prénatal joined “the Artsana family.” Ara adds that Artsana began as a small wholesale business and launched the Chicco name in 1958.

The next change came almost two decades later. In 2015 Artsana and the toy company Giochi Preziosi combined their retail arms in a joint venture, Prénatal Retail Group. The finance news site BeBeez reported in July 2017 that the venture had brought together 551 shops across Europe under the Toys Center, King Jouet, Prénatal and Bimbostore names. In April 2016 the private-equity firm Investindustrial had taken a 60 per cent stake in Artsana, BeBeez and Ara both report, with the Catelli family keeping the remainder.

In July 2017 Artsana agreed to buy Giochi Preziosi’s half of the venture, giving it control of the whole retail group, BeBeez reported. PRG’s timeline dates Artsana’s full control to 2017, and the group now presents itself under the shorter name PRG Retail Group.

Neighbourhood shops, megastores and a two-floor flagship.

Prénatal sells clothing for babies and young children, maternity wear and nursery equipment, which Italian retail calls puericultura, together with bed textiles and toys. PRG describes the Italian network as a mix of shops and megastores. In a May 2023 statement marking sixty years in Italy, the group said Prénatal had 165 stores in Italy and 122 more in Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands and France; a September 2023 statement gave 168 in Italy and 114 elsewhere, so the counts shift from one release to the next.

The fullest picture of the large format comes from Assago Milanofiori, just outside Milan, where PRG opened a combined store in October 2022. The company said the building covered more than 3,000 square metres, with Prénatal on a 1,700-square-metre ground floor and Toys Center upstairs, the two floors linked by a slide and a moving ramp. PRG described fittings in oak from FSC-certified forests, a house-shaped installation and a “tree of life” at the entrance, a test route for pushchairs and modular systems, embroidery added to garments in the shop, and two Digital Points for browsing the wider range.

The same statement named two services the company presents as part of the Prénatal offer: the lista nascita, a birth list that families share with relatives and friends, and a punto ricambi, where customers can get replacement parts for nursery items bought at Prénatal. PRG said the Prénatal floor covered clothing from birth to ten years and a maternity collection.

The banner sits inside a wider family of shop names. PRG lists Prénatal next to Toys Center, Bimbo Store, King Jouet and FAO Schwarz. Its timeline says Maxi Toys joined in 2021; that the first FAO Schwarz store in continental Europe opened in Milan that year under an agreement with Three Sixty Group; that PRG acquired Toys “R” Us assets in Spain and Portugal in 2022; and that a joint venture with King Jouet, Toki Lab, followed in 2023. The group also says it introduced a new PRG logo in 2022.

Prénatal used its Italian anniversary for a community project. In September 2023 it launched Generazione G, short for “Generazione Genitori,” a fundraising scheme run with the parents’ association Moige, with donations collected in about 400 stores of the group’s banners and online, the company said.

How nursery chains present themselves.

Baby and nursery store chains in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Australia sell to families at the same moment in life, but each presents itself in its own way. The shop sign and logo are the first point of contact, and the same name is carried onto catalogues and websites; Mothercare’s history page, for example, shows its catalogues from 1962 onwards beside shopfronts from Kingston in 1961 to Plymouth in 2018. Colour schemes are each company’s own choice.

Store formats run from large nursery superstores to high-street shops and shop-in-shop counters inside other retailers. Mothercare describes a range from small shop-in-shop units to mid-sized high-street stores and larger out-of-town or shopping-mall stores, while PRG Retail Group describes Prénatal’s Italian network as a mix of shops and megastores, including a two-floor store near Milan shared with the Toys Center banner.

Franchising is one route abroad. Mothercare says it began franchising in 1984 and awards one partner per territory, so the same name can appear over stores run by different companies in different countries. Own-label ranges sit beside branded nursery goods, and the companies name and describe those ranges themselves on their websites and in their catalogues.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story: founders, owners and changes of ownership. Mothercare and Prénatal have both passed through mergers, private-equity ownership or sale, and Mothercare’s British shops closed after its UK arm entered administration in 2019. For a design reader, these pages are a direct record of how a name, a sign and a palette have travelled through those changes.

The Dutch stores took their own path.

The Dutch Prénatal shares the name and much of the history but now has a separate owner. In November 2023 the German investment company Mutares agreed to buy PRG’s Prénatal stores and online business in the Netherlands, 38 points of sale in all, together with an exclusive licence to use the Prénatal brand there, the trade site Europe Real Estate reported; the deal was subject to approval by the competition authority. In September 2026 Mutares sold the Dutch business to its chief executive in a management buyout, the German finance site Trading-Treff reported, describing a chain of 34 stores with an online shop and more than 65 years in the Dutch market.

In France, where the name began, PRG’s timeline still lists France among the countries where the group serves families, alongside Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Ownership of the Italian business has stayed with Artsana: Ara wrote in May 2026 that the group’s brands include Chicco, Boppy, Neo Baby and Prénatal, as well as the Toys Center and Bimbo Store chains.

For a design guide, Prénatal shows how one shop name can travel across borders and owners, and how a store format can carry a brand from neighbourhood shops to a two-floor flagship shared with a toy banner. Compare Chicco, the nursery brand from the same Artsana group, and Toys “R” Us, whose Spanish and Portuguese stores PRG took over in 2022. For this guide we use a berry, a blush and a warm cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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