Leia & Gary Sfez are taking Parisian design discovery to America
The Paris-founded design marketplace is turning its curated European aesthetic toward American collectors as founders Leia and Gary Sfez build The Oblist into a global design destination.
For Leia and Gary Sfez, taking The Oblist to America does not start with a warehouse, factory or corporate office. It starts with taste.
The husband-and-wife founders launched The Oblist in Paris in 2023 as a highly curated destination for collectible furniture, art and design. Three years later, the platform represents more than 500 creatives and is deliberately turning its attention toward American collectors.
Building a marketplace around taste
The Oblist operates in a crowded world of online marketplaces, but the founders have built the company around curation rather than endless inventory. Its selection brings together furniture, objects, lighting, art and collectible pieces from established names and emerging creatives.
That positioning makes the founders themselves unusually important to the product. The value proposition is not simply access to objects; it is access to a particular point of view about which objects and designers are worth discovering.
Leia Sfez brings an audience with her
Leia Sfez entered the business with an existing presence in fashion and design. Her personal aesthetic and audience give The Oblist something many marketplaces have to spend heavily to manufacture: recognizable taste, organic distribution and a founder who naturally fits the world the company is selling.
Gary Sfez brings the complementary business side of the partnership. Together, the pair have turned that combination of curation, commerce and personal brand into a marketplace designed to feel closer to an editorial destination than a conventional e-commerce platform.
Now they're courting American collectors
The United States is becoming a deliberate growth market. In 2026, The Oblist launched a U.S.-focused brand campaign designed to introduce its Parisian point of view to American collectors and position the platform more visibly within the country's collectible-design market.
The campaign reflects a different kind of European market-entry strategy. The Oblist does not need to manufacture locally to begin building an American business. Its initial challenge is cultural and commercial: translate a distinctly European design identity into something American collectors want to discover, follow and ultimately buy.
The founder is part of the distribution strategy
That is where The Oblist becomes particularly interesting as a founder story. In categories such as fashion, interiors and collectible design, founder visibility can be more than personal branding. It can become a customer-acquisition channel.
Leia's presence within the fashion and design ecosystem gives The Oblist a human identity that is difficult for a conventional marketplace to reproduce. Instead of separating the founder from the brand, The Oblist can use that association to reinforce the taste and lifestyle it wants consumers to connect with the platform.
Parisian taste, American ambition
The Oblist represents a softer form of European expansion into America, but potentially a powerful one. There is no billion-dollar factory announcement or major acquisition. The asset crossing the Atlantic is a point of view.
For Leia and Gary Sfez, the opportunity is to turn a Paris-born platform and its carefully constructed aesthetic into a recognizable destination for American design buyers. If that works, The Oblist will demonstrate that European companies do not always need to Americanize their identity to scale in the U.S. Sometimes the European identity is exactly what they are selling.
