Marcel G. Cohen de Mehrez

The name and the origins

Marcel George Cohen — Marcel George Cohen de Mehrez in the French registers, the old compound name of a Cohen line — was born on 30 September 1949 in Oujda, in eastern Morocco, into a Moroccan Jewish family. A shopkeeper at fourteen, selling clothes in Morocco, he arrived in France in 1971, at twenty-one, as he told the entrepreneurial press. His card appears in this directory as a personal tribute: its family facts were given to the site by his own.

A four-square-metre shop

A former seller of the Sentier, in 1981 he opened a shop of four square metres in the passage de l'Industrie, in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, selling hair products to professionals; after a trip to the United States where he discovered the products made for Black hair, he turned to ethnic beauty, and that choice became the business of his life. 'I am the one who made the boulevard de Strasbourg', he liked to say — the press that walked the quarter in 2015 presented him as the pioneer of afro cosmetics in Paris, shop after shop around Château-d'Eau.

MGC International

The house he built on it, MGC International, became the French leader in ethnic cosmetics — 'the number one of cosmopolitan beauty', as the firm itself put it after thirty-seven years — with twelve points of sale in Paris, a brand of its own carried in some 1,500 French shops, and a presence the entrepreneurial press counted in 88 countries, Africa taking half of the exports and forty-five people working in the house by 2014.

A business school turned the company into a case study, presenting its founder as the very image of the self-made man. In October 2018, closing the shop on the rue de Rennes, the house took its leave of its customers in a letter recalling those thirty-seven years of success.

A family house

MGC was, in the words of the press headline that visited it, a real family that grows. His son Yohann was the managing director, his son Kevin served as deputy managing director, his son Norman ran the export house, his daughter Laura joined the house in communication, and the company is presided over today by Padremar, the family holding that gathers his five children — Yohann, Kevin, Jordan, Norman and Laura. His elder brother, Edmond Cohen, made a career entirely of his own, rebuilding the Paris menswear house De Fursac — the two brothers never worked together; his card stands beside this one.

The property companies

Beside the cosmetics house, the French registers list some twenty property companies under his direction, from the Sequoia partnership founded in 1971 at Eaubonne to the holdings created in 2020.

Decorations

By decree of the President of the Republic of 18 April 2014, published in the Journal officiel of 20 April, he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur on the list of the ministry of foreign affairs — 'M. Cohen (Marcel, George), président d'une société de produits cosmétiques ethniques ; 44 ans de services', reads the line — taking rank from 5 December 2014, as his letters patent record. He had been made a Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite by the brevet signed in Paris on 14 November 2005.

The two framed brevets, each bearing its insignia — the red ribbon of the Légion, the blue ribbon of the Mérite — are photographed in the media gallery of this card. His family records the two ceremonies for this card: the insignia of the Mérite was presented to him by Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, at the ministry of the interior; that of the Légion d'Honneur by général d'armée Bernard Thorette, former chief of staff of the French army, at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris.