La boutique du futur, the place to find unusual gadgets in Montrouge (92)

A stone's throw from Porte d'Orléans, in Montrouge, is a store, workshop and design gallery you'll remember for a long time: with its design objects, Boutique du Futur is Ali Baba's cave of original gift ideas and small gadgets of all kinds.

Welcome to Montrouge, to the Boutique du Futur, a genuine design laboratory, a place open to all, a workshop and, incidentally, a store selling downright unusual objects. It's the brainchild of Nicolas Trüb, an engineer by training who was already tinkering with and inventing beautiful inventions in 1995, in his little apartment in Montrouge. In the meantime, he has democratized his 100% French-made inventions on the other side of the world: Tokyo, New York... Yet he had no customers in Montrouge. So, in 2006, Nicolas opened the Boutique du Futur, a place in his image, right in the heart of Montrouge.

Far from being a classic boutique, the Boutique du Futur serves as aworkshop, showroom and meeting place. Here, the emphasis is on experimentation and testing: more than a third of the items on sale in the Boutique are actually prototypes, developed by Nicolas. When you come in, you can visit the workshop, find out how certain prototypes are assembled, see the exhibits hanging in the boutique gallery... All in all, this Boutique du Futur looks more like a design museum than a store, and in fact, it's one of the top 3 cultural places to visit in Montrouge!

Here, you'll find ingenious gadgets such as the Baby Plane, a small spoon in the shape of an airplane for feeding children in a playful way - one of the boutique's bestsellers, with several hundred thousand units sold -, the Savosec, a device to ensure that your soap never goes soft again on the edge of your shower... There's also a whole range of "I love Montrouge" products to promote this tourist destination in the Paris suburbs in a humorous way: t-shirts, mugs and even Montrouge water! "We're always looking for new ideas," explains Nicolas, "and as a designer, I have a lot of fun. As soon as I have an idea, I prototype it.

At La Boutique du Futur, humor is king, and there's no shortage of puns: bestsellers include an Insecurity armband, a Dromagrume for squeezing your morning orange, and more. "All our products are made locally, 100% French, low-tech, because everything works on fairly old physics principles... And low-cost, to keep it affordable," says Nicolas, who talks extensively with his customers about each of his new inventions. They are the ones who give feedback on the prototypes sold in the boutique, and this is the most important thing at the Boutique du Futur: customers are the designer's "guinea pigs", and he remains 100% transparent with them. What's more, on the Boutique du Futur's TikTok account, you can learn how to make some of the objects sold in the store yourself, as Nicolas offers tutorials accessible to all.