From my parents’ garage to the Hirica factory
In 2014 I stored my first orders in the family garage in Hossegor. Eleven years later we took over a former shoe factory in Saint-Vincent-de-Tyrosse. The story of a path that was never obvious.
The first time I walked through the abandoned Hirica factory, in July 2024, I came across the fire safety plan still pinned to the wall. One room was labelled: “insole manufacturing room”.
A disused shoe factory, on a business park in the Landes, with an insole manufacturing room. For a podiatry company looking for premises, the story wrote itself. It was love at first sight, and a very clear intention to bring the buildings back to life.
A problem I lived from the inside
I am a podiatrist by training. I studied in Paris, in a family where the profession is handed down: my father is a podiatrist, and so was my grandfather.
In 2014, in my third year, I noticed something all my classmates noticed too, without anyone doing anything about it: getting equipped is painful. Podiatry supplies were expensive, hard to find, and delivered on absurd timescales. The kind of friction you end up accepting as a fact of the job.
I had no entrepreneurial career plan. I had a problem I dealt with every day, and a hunch that a website could fix it. I built my-podologie.com.
It needed stock. I commandeered my parents’ garage in Hossegor. My father — a podiatrist, so a potential customer as much as the garage’s owner — was understanding about it. That is a piece of luck I appreciate more today than I did then.
Seven years leading two lives
In 2015, newly qualified, I opened a podiatry practice in Hossegor. Not out of any attachment to wearing two hats: the practice funded the fledgling company.
Running both was anything but restful. Patients in the morning, orders in the evening. That period lasted until 2022, the year I closed the practice because my-podologie.com no longer left room for anything else.
Seven years is a long time. It is also what let the company grow without my having to ask it to feed me straight away. Looking back, it is probably the most structuring decision I made — and it was a cautious one, not a bold one.
COVID, and what it revealed
By then the business had moved out of the garage to Seignosse. Then the pandemic arrived.
We saw a considerable spike in activity. The reason is simple, and I had not anticipated it: podiatrists often practise in centres that bring together several healthcare professionals. When those centres needed medical equipment, they turned to the supplier they already knew. Us.
That is where my-medical.fr came from, open to professionals and consumers alike. It was not a diversification decided in a meeting: it was a demand that already existed, and it had to be answered.
One brand per profession, per need
The same reasoning produced the others. my-pedicurie.com for consumers. my-purificateur.com for air quality. my-blouse.com for professional workwear. my-glow.com for wellness and beauty. Today the brands sit together under my-infinity.eu.
We are a team of close to thirty people. What sets us apart is less the catalogue than the stock: it is what lets us deliver anywhere in France in under 24 hours, and anywhere in the world in 96. Holding deep stock is a heavy financial commitment, which is precisely why few competitors do it.
Everything else was built around that. Healthcare professionals on the team, who sign off on new products from our own brands, designed by our R&D department. Sites in French, Spanish and English. A mobile app built in-house. An embroidery workshop to personalise professional clothing. A first-aid kit workshop for sports clubs and institutions.
Why Saint-Vincent-de-Tyrosse
In Seignosse we were plainly out of space. The question was not whether to move, but where.
I had no desire to lose colleagues by relocating to another region. It is a criterion people underestimate when they look at a map and a price per square metre: a company can move, a team cannot.
Hirica ticked every box. Close to the main roads, to a retail park, to a gym. And, above all, with buildable land next door for the day we need it.
Bought in December 2024, refurbished, inaugurated on 3 July 2025. Since then our growth has run at 80%. We had not overestimated our needs.
Staying here
I have always wanted to stay within the MACS district. These are my roots, and as long as I find an environment here that suits the business, I see no reason to go elsewhere.
That is not purely sentimental. The district’s economic development service genuinely helped: backing with the banks, introductions to the Département and the Région when we applied for property support. On a brownfield conversion project, those channels are the difference between an application that moves and one that stalls.
2026: making here what comes from far away
Our next two projects are production units.
The first will manufacture orthopaedic insoles — in a former shoe factory, the loop will be complete.
The second will produce gouge blades. It is a surgical instrument essential to podiatry care, complementary to the scalpel, and today manufactured mainly in India and China. The know-how exists in France. It is time to bring it back.
This piece draws on and expands the interview given to the Maremne Adour Côte-Sud district council for its series of entrepreneur profiles: Portrait de Quentin Benchetrit (in French).