Never has the customs officer’s flair lived up to its name so well! For a week, from November 12 to 19, Bercy’s armed wing carried out a vast operation to combat perfume counterfeiting across the four corners of France. Code name: Fragrance. In Île-de-France, it is in Aubervilliers, a commune in Seine-Saint-Denis, that the specialists in imitated and copied products have arrived. And not just anywhere! It is on the adjacent streets of the Fashion Center, a temple of cheap clothes reserved for wholesalers, that the customs officers have set their sights.
Less than 7 km from the center of Paris, around fifty wholesale perfume sellers have set up there. “The buyers come from all over Europe, particularly from the Netherlands and Belgium,” says a customs officer familiar with the area. We also come from Algeria. First for the clothes, which they pile up in their cars. Then for different accessories, such as glasses, jewelry and therefore perfumes which they carry in dozens of boxes. »