Three years of Joannes Soënen at Jules: the turnaround architect

When Joannes Soënen took the helm of Jules in June 2023, the French menswear chain was carrying the weight of a recent cyberattack, a shrinking top line and a store network that had aged out of step with its customers. Roughly two years later, the business he describes as having undergone "a rapid turnaround between 2023 and 2024" was back to nearly 470 million euros in revenue and entering a phase of consolidation. Soënen has done it largely out of public view, letting the numbers and the renovated stores speak in his place.

A retailer shaped by product and sourcing

Soënen is a product of the apparel trade rather than the boardroom theatre that sometimes surrounds it. A graduate of SKEMA Business School in Lille, where he completed studies in accounting and finance in 1992, he began his career that same year at the northern French womenswear retailer Camaïeu as a product manager. He spent four years buying in Asia before becoming head of sourcing in 1996, then took charge of the womenswear product department in 2000. That grounding in buying and merchandising gave him an operator's instinct for margin, assortment and supply chains, and helps explain why his transformation plans tend to start with the product rather than the marketing.

Journey to leadership

Soënen left Camaïeu in 2002 for the children's wear chain Tape à l'Oeil, joining as marketing and product-sourcing director. In 2007 he was named chief executive, a position he held for 11 years while steering the brand's expansion in France and abroad and its early digital and omnichannel shift. After more than a decade there, he took on a turnaround brief at Jellej Jouets, the company that had acquired Toys R Us France, where he was charged with bringing the toy retailer together with rival Picwic. In August 2019 he returned to where it all began, taking the presidency of Camaïeu International, then a fast-fashion business with some 900 stores worldwide and roughly 718 million euros in annual sales. The Camaïeu chapter is the most difficult of his career, and worth stating plainly. The retailer was already in serious distress when he arrived, and the Covid-19 crisis pushed it into receivership in 2020. Soënen put forward an offer to take over the womenswear chain; it was passed over in favour of a bid from Michel Ohayon's Financière Immobilière Bordelaise. He moved on to Celio in November 2020, running the menswear chain's operational recovery until 2022, before being approached for Jules.

A turnaround built on four pillars

At Jules, Soënen inherited a brand founded in the nineties as Camaïeu Homme, the menswear complement to the womenswear chain. The brand sits within Fashion Cube, the menswear-and-womenswear retail grouping of the Mulliez family's Association Familiale Mulliez; the wider portfolio has thinned since 2022, when the family sold Pimkie and Orsay and the FashionCube ecosystem was effectively broken up, leaving Jules among the leaders the family chose to concentrate on. It had become a société à mission, a purpose-driven company, in April 2023, committing to lower its carbon footprint and reshore part of its production into organic or recycled materials. It had also been hit by an October 2022 cyberattack that paralysed parts of its information systems for several days. The network today numbers somewhere between 386 and 440 points of sale across roughly ten countries, the figure itself moving as the estate is consolidated through store closures, mergers and conversions.

His response has rested on four clear priorities. The first is product, which Soënen treats as the historic engine of the brand. Jules roughly doubled its offer between 2023 and the end of 2024, moving from around 280 to 600 references per collection, with denim, underwear and a revived urban segment the main areas of investment. The aim was to be wide enough to serve as a genuine menswear destination against international giants and online pure players, while lowering prices to broaden the customer base. Event-driven capsules, including a partnership with sports daily L'Équipe and a Valentine's Day 2025 tie-up with Le Slip Français, have been used to put the brand back in the spotlight. The brand now targets, in his words, "men who care about how they look," and reads its core as 30 to 45 years old without abandoning either older or newer shoppers.

The second is the store network. Many outlets were small, often around 130 to 150 square metres, poorly located and tired, with codes and fittings that dated to the 2000s. Soënen moved to fewer but larger stores, no longer opening anything below 350 square metres and going as high as 600 or 700. Part of that came from extinguishing the separate Brice fascia, which still counted 77 stores in September 2023 and was wound down progressively into adjacent Jules locations. A new store concept, lighter and more transparent with redesigned fitting areas and the floor split into two worlds — Allure for seasonal, inspirational looks and Besoins for everyday essentials — was tested at the end of 2024 and has since reached 70 stores; the 450-square-metre flagship at the Westfield Lyon Part-Dieu centre is a recent expression of the approach. In all, around two-thirds of the estate will have been modernised over three years.

The third pillar is digital and omnichannel, where Jules was visibly behind. Online sales represented around 5% of revenue in 2023. The business closed 2025 at 12% and is targeting 25% within two to three years. The rollout of RFID has given it unified stock, a precondition for digitalising operations.

The fourth is technology and data. Soënen found what he has called a heavy technical debt, with some systems in place for 30 years and insufficiently modernised. He created a data and AI division, appointed a chief data officer to the executive committee and built a central data platform on Snowflake. The work has produced concrete gains: a "click-to-possession" dashboard tracking the time between payment and delivery helped improve delivery-promise performance by two points and recovered the equivalent of 104 days of annual productivity once lost to manual work.

Impact and achievements

The headline result is the recovery itself. Jules generated close to 420 million euros in revenue across 7.7 million customers in 2023 and reached nearly 470 million euros in 2025, drawing on a base of more than 8 million customers, with management describing the profile of that revenue as more profitable than before. The turnaround was achieved quickly, with the inflection coming between 2023 and 2024, and the business has since shifted from rescue to consolidation.

Two threads run alongside the financial recovery. Sustainability, which Soënen deliberately pushed into the background during 2023 and 2024 to focus on product and pricing, was reactivated from 2025 without, he says, any cut to the underlying effort: Jules runs a resale site and textile-to-textile collection, offers eco-designed "perfect products" guaranteed for four years, and draws on the Fashion Cube Denim Center at Neuville-en-Ferrain, a shared group factory inaugurated in April 2022, before his arrival, that reshored French denim production and swapped water-intensive washes for laser and ozone finishing. Around 55% of Jules' products now use lower-impact materials, with a goal of approaching 100%. Brand visibility is the second thread, rebuilt through a 2024 brand platform and, after activation lagged in 2025, an iconography and campaign refresh launched with the agency Ores at the start of 2026, with the first joint campaign appearing that April. Soënen has been candid that the cyberattack, painful as it was, became an accelerator for the systems overhaul his team needed anyway. The willingness to treat a crisis as a forcing function, rather than a setback to be managed quietly, is a recurring feature of his approach.

In the news

Soënen keeps a low profile and has been described as discreet since taking the role, surfacing in the trade and business press mainly around concrete milestones, store openings, the data and AI strategy, and the occasional interview on the health of French apparel retail. In September 2025 he co-authored an opinion piece with consultancy Advancy arguing that artificial intelligence is a practical lever for survival in a sector battered by insolvencies, rather than an abstract promise. He is not a controversial figure; the closest his record comes to controversy is the failed Camaïeu rescue bid, which reflected the brutal economics of French apparel more than any misstep of his own.

The operator behind the strategy

Soënen describes his leadership in terms of shared vision and collective performance, summed up in a maxim he returns to: treat your teams well, and they will look after the customer. He has positioned himself as an active transformer of the textile industry toward greater social and environmental responsibility, and has invested in and sat on the boards of younger companies alongside his executive roles. Beyond that he says little publicly about his personal life, consistent with an executive who prefers the work to do the talking.

For Soënen, the lesson of the past three years is less about Jules than about the industry around it. "The chains that suffer," he has said, "are those that fail to transform." It is a fitting line from a chief executive who has spent his career being handed businesses in trouble and, more often than not, finding a way to move them forward.