Turbulent debut

 The first customers were welcomed to the Manufaktura shopping and entertainment centre on May 16th in pouring rain and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. Maurice Bansay and Stephen Pragnell, together with other officials of Apsys, the project’s developer, remarked that pouring rain during important ceremonies bodes well for the future. But does Manufaktura really require a bit of luck, or are the prospects safe for the French company’s 9-year project?It all began in the 1990s when Mieczysław Michalski, the manager of the Poltex factory (the erstwhile Israel Poznański textile mill) was looking for a company that might be interested in modernising the mill’s old post–industrial buildings. One of the people he wrote to was a certain Frenchman. It was in 1997 that Maurice Bansay, president of Apsys, discovered the charms of the industrial city of Łódź and recognised the inherent potential of the dilapidated textile empire situated in the city cent