As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).
That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article.
Beside the nostalgia i think a lot of people support them because it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees) [1] and it’s nice to see that another kind of company is possible.
>For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).
I only knew the version where your age is the number on the glass. For fetching water, it was the slowest person to say "pot d'eau" (water jug) and sometimes put a hand to your head (it depended on the group).
I might have generalized then. It’s maybe something that we had only in the south (aka the broc à eau area). We also used it to check our age of course.
Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.
It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.
Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.
For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.
If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them.
They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.
Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.
As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.
There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.
They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.
The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.
Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years.
The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.
None of that changes anything to the points of my previous comment.
Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.
Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.
I have never claimed nor suggested that their situation is because they are a coop...
Most of the replies I got here have not even read my comments, apparently, and completely beside the point or just rush to condemn me for blaspheming. It's like the poor guy who dares disagreeing at a student socialist meeting.
Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.
That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.
> just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.
Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Everyone can rally round in their time of need but that doesn't change the fact that Duralex was struggling to begin with, and once this goodwill windfall dries up they'll be back here.
> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)
With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.
> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.
The article mentions it, but don’t insist on it. Duralex is now quite a special company: they were a renowned and beloved brand that was heading toward bankruptcy, until last year when the company was bought by its own workers and turned into a cooperative.
Since then, they have stayed afloat, probably thanks mainly to people wanting to support a worker-owned business by buying their glasses, but still, it works.
It’s a pretty positive story so far, and I hope they’ll continue to thrive under this new structure.
Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated. I was pleased to read in the article that they're working to increase exports. I'm a big believer in products that are engineered to last rather than be regularly replaced.
There's a reason why worker owned companies (which were quite prevalent and a key factor in the 20th century's socialist movements) did not survive in our capitalist world. If we want to see these kinds of companies thrive, we need to change the entire market philosophy. Otherwise they will always be out-competed by companies that favour revenue/profit over worker benefits. In fact they will not even take off in the first place, because that needs capital and investors who own capital will want shares in return, which goes against the core principle of worker-ownership.
I am particularly interested in coops as a model for a tech startup. How would one go about structuring a new corporation to best ensure it remains a coop?
Plenty of worker owned software consultancies in germany, and specially in Hamburg for some reason.
From the site of one that I that I used to work for(they are very friendly so you can hit them up if you want some advice on setting up one)
> How exactly are you structured?
> In our search for a structure that consistently implements the principles of responsible ownership, we came across the veto-share model. First, the principles are enshrined in the company's articles of association. Then, company shares are transferred to a controlling shareholder. This controlling shareholder is granted veto rights, which must be used to prevent any future deviation from the principles. We are delighted to have the Purpose Foundation on board as our controlling shareholder!
> We want to offer every (new) team member the long-term prospect of assuming entrepreneurial responsibility as a co-owner. The criteria for this are already defined in the articles of association. To simplify joining and leaving, we have established dyve Trust eGbR, a partnership that holds 99% of the voting rights in dyve.
Mondragon is often used by people who don't know much about the subject as a counter example, but if you look under the hood, you'll see it doesn't even compare: Less than half the workers own shares and the majority of shares is held by a small circle of executives in the richest branches. That's basically a standard capitalist pig with some socialist lipstick to give pseudo-Marxists an argument in these discussions, when there is none to be had in the first place. In fact Nvidia has a higher percentage of employees owning shares than Mondragon. Would you call that "worker-owned" too?
None of this should be surprising either, because anything that truly benefits workers will be at odds with things that benefit the business. In society there are always people who primarily get paid and people who primarily work. Even the real Marx realized that. If you really want to defeat capitalism, then you have to do more than just play pretend.
There are many successful co-ops all over the world, including in the US. You just don't hear about them because they don't look much different from corporations from the perspective of the average person.
The main they don't survive is not due to capitalism. (Capitalism is just trade without use of force at the end of the day) but due to the lobbying power of corporations. Corporations constantly lobby the government for more regulation and rules, which they just budget for, but smaller companies don't have the funds to meet so they cannot stay in business.
Look at the first couple of years of COVID for example, Walmart, Target and the big box stores lobbied the government to stay open because they were "essential" while all the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power.
The solution is to stop giving corporations the ability to lobby governments, and stop using the government to control/fund markets. Not to blame it on capitalism.
> the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power
Small businesses have a lot if lobbying power (NFIB, US Chamber of Commerce to a certain extent) especially during the pandemic. The PPP loan forgiveness program was ridiculously generous. Despite it being marketed as a way to save jobs, only a third of the money ended up going towards jobs that were at risk.
Those are good points, but it again shows how government getting involved does more harm than good.
The government forced the lockdowns instead of letting people make their decisions about their health, then they tries to aid the businesses they caused to suffer, and most of the money didn't end up where it was supposed to. So many examples of this over and over when you look at government involvement.
> The fantastic 7 tech companies, get billions of dollars from the government grants, tax breaks, business
> We have 4 ISP's that monopolize the market, due to the government giving them billions of dollars to expand infrastructure, which they misappropriated and then uses for lobbying against small ISP's
> The SNAP program subsidizes big companies like Walmart, target, etc due to them being able to eat the costs of all the massive regulatiom around it.
> etc. etc. etc.
That's not what capitalism is... or it's a very elementary understanding of it. Trade without force existed prior to and contemporary to capitalism. (See markets and mercantilism for more history there.) Capitalism is specifically the sort of mercantilism under which maximizing one's capital (typically the money commodity) becomes the aim.
Historically, money commodity was used to mediate exchange between two other commodities - I sell my wheat, get money, use money to buy pork. I'm buying commodities because I intend to use them or share them. Commodity -> money -> commodity. Capitalism inverts this -- the goal is to maximize money. I start with money, I convert it to a commodity that I can sell for a greater value, to get larger money. Money -> commodity -> money. You see Amazon operate this way: "if we can put one dollar in and get $1.01 out, do it".
Thank you for that correction, I did oversimplify it.
> Capitalism inverts this -- the goal is to maximize money. I start with money, I convert it to a commodity that I can sell for a greater value, to get larger money. Money -> commodity -> money. You see Amazon operate this way: "if we can put one dollar in and get $1.01 out, do it".
Yes, that is correct and there is nothing wrong with this as long as there is no coercion happening (eg. Government involvement, lobbying and over regulation).
Every person on earth should have the right to put in $1 into something and try to get $1.01 from it. You and I and every other individual get to then decide if we want to give that business owner that $1.01 or go to a competitor. In a truly free market, that business owner only earns that $1.01 profit by providing a good or service that voluntary customers value at more than the price they pay. The profit is the reward for creating value for others
We currently live in a crony-capitalist world which has a lot of issues, but it's still much better than the 200m+ that have died under Marxism and Communism in the last 100 years.
The whole article documents a product that people do want and like so much that they're willing to donate 4x what the owner-operators of the company asked for.
It's odd to see you expressing disdain for 'high school politics' and 'because younger generations don't know' while also displaying such ignorance or disregard of the subject matter, like watching factual waves roll in and dash themselves on the rocks of obdurate opinion.
The article is about a failing company on the verge of bankruptcy and which already went bankrupt 4 times this century, with turnover down 20% over the last 10 years...
My reply was to a specific comment. I do express disdain for those who preach socialism in 2025 because, as an European who was alive during the 20th century and has some mileage I do know the subject matter... And everyone should, too because of the ample historical and economic record available for all to study. Hence, "youth" is the only generous 'excuse' as the debate was conclusively settled by the 1980s. Judging by the puerile reactions I will go with that...
Please refrain from the typical ad hominem attacks and insults.
I'm probably older than you; perhaps that's why your argumentation seems so juvenile. It seems not to have occurred to you that bankruptcies can occur other than for reasons of pure supply and demand or product quality.
You realize there's an entire spectrum of socialist ideology between liberalism and authoritarian planned economies, yeah? It's not a Boolean, and it's not a slippery slope. We could have broadly liberal markets owned and run by the workers, and without the authoritarianism.
This is a slippery slope... The comment I replied to is an example of that: specifically on this aspect, it doesn't really matter whether a company is owned and run by the workers (we can have thay today and we do), but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete. Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope that ends badly, always.
Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.
Socialism can indeed only ends one way and that is the removal of individual freedoms.
It's not about eliminating competition. It's about trying to create an economic environment where companies are incentivized to compete by actually producing value rather than:
- Regulatory capture
- Buying out their competitors
- Being cheaper at the cost of horrible externalities
And the many other failure modes of "free markets".
Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope
Nobody is doing that. The article specifically mentions pursuing opportunities in the export market.
Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.
The workers bought out the previous owners, presumably due to frustration with the firm having had 4 near-collapses in the last 20 years under the capitalistic management approach.Your objections seem conditioned rather than considered; did you actually think any of this through, or are just just reacting to concepts that make you uncomfortable while overlooking the facts?
> but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete
There is no such thing as an actual "free market", nor should there be. Markets need rules to operate otherwise you get fraud and "unhealthy" competition like sabotage and assassinations.
> Socialism can indeed only ends one way and that is the removal of individual freedoms.
That's like saying that capitalism only ends one way and that is slavery.
In reality, there is no inherently slippery slope in either direction. There is a spectrum of ways to aporoach market regulation and individual freedom with various tradeoffs.
Blind partisan rhetoric like yours doesn't help uncover what those tradeoffs are so we can make good decisions. Instead it spreads ignorance and division.
Are you honestly comparing their proposal to the USSR and the "proletarian dictatorship imposed at gun point" to democratically changing laws to force all companies to become worker owned cooperatives?
At the end of the day, if we had a million worker owned cooperatives, they would still need to compete. Since workers from Coop1 need to sell better products than workers from Coop2, otherwise they will still lose their jobs.
Also, the current setup is a race to the bottom: lowest quality that doesn't self destruct immediately (aka planned obsolescence), dumping ALL externalities onto the general public: ideally with the same timed fuse approach so that it's not noticed immediately (dumping toxic waste in rivers, polluting the earth and the air, oil spills, etc - the list is endless), all in the name of a slightly lower initial price to attract customers. It's not sustainable.
While there is no shortage of irrelevant details, the article is very light on relevant details. What prevents the factory from staying in business? Not enough orders? The French people supposedly love this glassware and orders pour in whenever the company is mentioned. They have the factory up and running, they have employees. The workers own the means of production, what could be better than that?
Why do they need to expand into new product ranges, if the existing products are in such high demand? I'm not sure if the proposed pint glasses for British pubs are a sure winner. Why not stick with what already works?
As a French, my guess is simply that the brand is not price competitive and up until now, they didn't have the right marketing to justify the higher prices.
Duralex is a beloved brand, and the French wouldn't like to see it go, but not enough to have much of an influence in the shopping aisle. The nostalgia aspect is real (ask the French about the numbers at the bottom of the glass ;) ), but it may be a negative when looking for more "adult" glassware. Maybe you don't want your guests or yourself feel like your are in a school canteen. School canteens also don't have a reputation for being luxurious to say the least, which may be a problem if you want to charge a premium. It may be that's the idea behind the pint glasses by the way. Show that Duralex can make glassware for grownups too.
A Danish supermarket had a loyalty program where you'd collect point and could get Duralex drinking glasses for the points. We got probably 25 of them, I don't think I'd consider buying anything else going forward, the quality is absolutely worth the minimal extra cost. You can get six for around €25EUR that is basically free.
I don't agree that they aren't price competitive, at least on normal drinking glasses.
It is more expensive than for example IKEA glasses, but I swear by Duralex.
Ever since an IKEA glass spontaneously exploded on my desk.
I suddenly remembered we used Duralex at school in Sweden in the 90s, so I ordered brand new Duralex glasses and no explosions yet.
I imagine if they were being used in schools, with 13-17 year olds, being washed every day for years until they were covered in scratches, they must be pretty tough.
The issue is that it is difficult to find a marketing justification for high prices in everyday glassware... nothing more like a glass than another glass and people are obviously not prepared to pay a premium.
I use only borosilicate glass vessels for cooking, for storing food, for eating and for drinking (some from France, some from Czechia).
I have replaced some of them in order to have more optimized sizes and shapes for the ways I use them (even if the replaced vessels were still perfectly good), and I have some extra vessels kept in reserve for the very unlikely case when I will break a vessel (which has not happened yet).
I do not expect that I would need to buy any more such vessels during my lifetime, unless I will become bored of those that I have and I would want a change.
So making money from selling high-quality glassware that can last forever is much more difficult than getting free money from a software subscription.
Exactly. All my glassware are Duralex including coffe cups, and I haven't broken a single glass in 25+ years. Yet, they regularly fall on the ceramic kitchen floor from a hip level.
We had Duralex glasses in my schools' canteens. Not because they were high-quality but because they were cheap and (back then, at least) they readily shattered. I can buy basically the same quality glasses for 1/3 or 1/4 the price from ikea. Don't think they can compete on price with glasses made in China, Vietnam, Bulgaria or wherever production is cheapest these days.
Products which don't respect all the environment, the workers and the consumers are cheaper; much cheaper.
You can't win when other players are playing a different game.
This is another report from another French glass manufacturer. They couldn't meet their social responsibilty. Workers close the plant, and then the Mayor was pushing an unrelated company inthe viccinity, Nestle, to take over the failing glass plant
I have bought a lot of glassware over a couple decades. My usual trick is to look at restaurant supply shops, since they usually have a wide variety to select trade offs in style, price, quality, etc. Somehow I’d never come across Duralex until a few months ago when I was shopping to reorganize my own cupboards. The Duralex stuff I got has been the best glassware I’ve ever had, hands down. I’ll probably order more to put in storage just in case their ongoing struggles disrupt availability in the future.
I get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product.
Many years ago it was Hershey chocolate fudge jars that we’d put in the cupboard when they were empty. Then shrinkflation led to smaller jars and it lost some of the charm. I still have a few of the old ones.
> I get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product.
Where are you? Here in France they are not expensive. I bought them at Carrefour when I moved here because I liked the Picardie shape and I thought they were just one of many companies that makes them. They were surprisingly cheap (a bit more than 1 euro per glass iirc).
I’m in the USA. I can drop into the local Target and pick up a set of 6 pint glasses for around $10. Meanwhile a set of 6 Picardie 500ml glasses is $48 at Williams-Sonoma. (A bit cheaper online.) Worth every penny so far.
Bought one in Berlin and I would say they are 2-3 times the price of the cheapest competitor, but still worth it. I believe the US used to have their own more rectangular version of the glass.
The article doesn't even mention that this company already went bankrupt once this century, in 2008. Like some of the other posters, I furnished my cupboards with Duralex decades ago and never needed any more. In the same way, I filled my flatware drawers with Oneida decades before Oneida disappeared, and my plates are all from some long-forgotten Swedish stoneware maker, and I bought all my furniture from a dead Italian brand at a showroom that no longer exists in San Francisco. I have a personal pet theory on this, which is that the astronomical cost of housing has squeezed out all other aspects of home furnishing from people's budgets, in a race to the bottom where the last brand standing is Ikea.
I remember looking at their website and thinking the product design was horrible. The "Picardie" design is iconic, but not really in a good way. In my mind it says "functional" and "old". That's probably unfair, but it is what it is. Everything else they have is generic in the extreme. The IKEA catalog has far more interesting glassware.
Funny that you mention IKEA.
I have 4 very old IKEA glasses that were made by Duralex. I just love the fact that they're about as old as I am (40 next year) and we're able to survive that long. I consider them to be the peak of IKEA glassware. Today IKEA glasses are known to be breaking easy - sometimes simply by getting hot in the dishwasher.
The design might look fresher, but they won't last.
The rest of my glasses (most) are Duralex as well. They're just very ... durable. I was kind of getting annoyed that the brand became so popular that I see them everywhere now (every other cafe serves water in them). I'm not French btw, my love for the glasses simply comes from seeing them outlast time and many pretty dramatic falls (a few times on hard ceramic tiles from a meter up and bouncing up almost as high again - leaving a few nearby mouths agape in the process).
But reading that they're a worker owned cooperative makes me want to buy many more from them. That's what I want: Stuff that's build to last a long time by people who can live from their work. Who cares if they look dated? For something that's used daily being old is a testament to their quality. I use my IKEA-Duralex glasses almost daily. They look much cooler than any new shit with their battle-scars ight scratches :-D).
IKEA is literally the opposite.
I’m not sure my drinking glasses are a place I really need “modern” and “new” and “whatever the opposite of functional” is. It’s a glass for drinking liquid out of. There is no innovation. There is no novel design yet to be found. It’s an almost ancient device. It should be functional above all else. They are for drinking water out of, not fucking decor.
And for what it’s worth, if you don’t like the Picardie glasses, they have like a dozen other shapes that might feel “modern” enough.
A few years ago, a journalist went to Duralex, after they restructured (to be own by the employees), and show off the glasses's solidity, live. Every single one of them broke:
I know Duralex because they're the de facto coffee cup for a latte in the world's best cafes. I dunno how or why it happened, but since about 2008 if you go to a cafe in Melbourne and your latte comes in anything BUT one of those Duralex glasses, you should run for the hills.
The brand suffered from energy price hikes, felt particularly sharply after 2022, and its marketing could clearly be improved. Only now, after more than two or three decades, are new designs finally appearing on the roadmap.
These glasses were once ubiquitous in public middle-school cafeterias, so the emotional attachment runs deep across generations.
> the soaring cost of gas and electricity were the firm’s largest and most worrying expense
Difficult to have factories when basic utilities are expensive. China has a big advantage there as well, not just in labour costs. They invested heavily in energy infrastructure over the past few decades.
How did they invest in that infrastructure ? The LGFVs they used for that are so large the only way to pay for their loans is to throw in new LGFVs.
If there's a place where the music will stop really suddenly and really hard, it's in China, where all this infrastructure to build cheap glasses will completely crumble under the cost of its own financing. They're not increasing margins, so they're not gonna match their bond yields...
If they experience a flood of orders every time they are mentioned in the media and people flock to throw them money when they are in trouble, it seems like they should raise prices commensurate with their costs increasing and should probably invest in a little advertising. The brand seems strong and undamaged but they continue to struggle? That seems like a pretty easy fix.
When they recently decided solar furnaces were not cost effective for electricity production (compared to solar panels), I did wonder if they couldn't be adapted to the production of energy intensive products like glass, bricks, or concrete.
Glass furnaces operate somewhere around 1500 C. Electrical heating would work, but that's also quite expensive, usually even more so.
What they'd want to do is try to recover and reuse heat. In principle, there's no reason "new" heat has to be added each time they heat a batch of glass, if heat can be transferred from cooling glass back to the input materials.
> What they'd want to do is try to recover and reuse heat. In principle, there's no reason "new" heat has to be added each time they heat a batch of glass, if heat can be transferred from cooling glass back to the input materials.
Have you worked in any industrial or craft setting involving molten glass or metal? Walked around a workshop? There's no way the heat is going back into the process.
I know there are industrial processes where heat is efficiently recycled, but I agree there are serious practical problems, particularly if the molten glass must be cooled quickly. Still, even somewhat lower grade heat can be upgraded back to high grade heat with high temperature heat pumps.
During a trip to Venice I had the good fortune of touring http://www.giuman.it/ and it was highly educational. Bringing the furnaces up to temperature takes time and turning them off each day isn't a good option. Gas comes primarily from Russia and price spikes have really hurt the business.
Selling products based on nostalgia does not work. Europe needs to do far more keep it's industry afloat and to make locally produced products competitive.
Duralex is currently selling products at 10x the costs of what a similar product, made in China, costs on Amazon. This is not sustainable. These enormous differences in prices mean that only very people can afford their products. It is a brand which sells an everyday item at prices, which are legitimately hard to afford for most of the population.
Obviously a company like this can not succeed long term. It is totally uncompetitive, except for some brand recognition and positive brand perception. These obviously help, but will do nothing for the long term success.
Duralex were used and loved in Spain, too. Most houses still have some of them, although nowadays there's lot more competition. I would pay twice for their glassware, quality-wise is good stuff.
Years ago I bought a bunch of duralex glasses, to replace my faded college IKEA plasticware. I still have every single one of them, and none are worse for wear. They've been dropped, survived several moves, and even toddlers, and are still going strong
The reason you see a lot of scratches on Duralex glasses in cafés and canteens is because they are so old, having lasted an order of magnitude longer than other glassware.
I don’t understand the comments here crowing about how this employee-owned company is a success story against capitalism or something. It was going to go out of business, employees bought it, they also couldn’t make it profitable and had to resort to effectively a gofundme to not collapse. And somehow this is a win against profit driven companies? Do you not see how utterly non-viable this is at scale?
Well the initial financial problems were under a traditional profit driven scheme. Almost certainy they wouldn't have got the donations they are getting today if they had remained in that model so the employee-owned scheme is at least somewhat better. It is also likely that, in addiiton to donations, they are getting extra sales by being employee-owened, at least in France.
Ultimately though it's probably the whole market theey are in (relatively cheap household goods) that is difficult for a company based in a rich country, whatever their ownership model.
As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table). That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article. Beside the nostalgia i think a lot of people support them because it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees) [1] and it’s nice to see that another kind of company is possible.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_coop%C3%A9ra...
>For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).
I only knew the version where your age is the number on the glass. For fetching water, it was the slowest person to say "pot d'eau" (water jug) and sometimes put a hand to your head (it depended on the group).
I might have generalized then. It’s maybe something that we had only in the south (aka the broc à eau area). We also used it to check our age of course.
no I was in IDF and the glass gets your age and the oldest or youngest had to fetch the water, so it not only in the south
To complete, the number was also deciding what age we were for that day
I too would like to believe that "another kind of company is possible", but this isn't a ringing endorsement...
Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.
It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.
Durable is really the French household name "par excellence".
You mean Duralex. And maybe not just in France. My British school canteen was monopolised by Duralex too.
> it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees)
On the other hand, I suspect that this also makes it more difficult for them to change and adapt.
Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.
For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.
If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them.
They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.
Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.
As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.
There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.
> Were they a coop when they went bankrupt?
They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.
The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.
Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years.
The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.
None of that changes anything to the points of my previous comment.
Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.
Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.
[0] https://www.novethic.fr/economie-et-social/business-model-en...
I have never claimed nor suggested that their situation is because they are a coop...
Most of the replies I got here have not even read my comments, apparently, and completely beside the point or just rush to condemn me for blaspheming. It's like the poor guy who dares disagreeing at a student socialist meeting.
Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.
That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.
> just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.
Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Everyone can rally round in their time of need but that doesn't change the fact that Duralex was struggling to begin with, and once this goodwill windfall dries up they'll be back here.
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> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)
With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.
> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.
But returning to that "quite possibly" remark: is it really possible?
It is an observed difference in behavior, the “quite possibly” qualifies the reason for the difference.
:s/employees/shareholders, and it still sounds true.
The article mentions it, but don’t insist on it. Duralex is now quite a special company: they were a renowned and beloved brand that was heading toward bankruptcy, until last year when the company was bought by its own workers and turned into a cooperative.
Since then, they have stayed afloat, probably thanks mainly to people wanting to support a worker-owned business by buying their glasses, but still, it works.
It’s a pretty positive story so far, and I hope they’ll continue to thrive under this new structure.
It's also because almost every french home has one of their glasses and they are good quality.
So it's a mix of history, tradition, enjoying good products, the pride you get from your country producing good products.
And not only homes. I moved to France several months ago, and I keep seeing the Duralex mark in cafes, at my workplace, basically everywhere.
Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated. I was pleased to read in the article that they're working to increase exports. I'm a big believer in products that are engineered to last rather than be regularly replaced.
> Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated.
Sad how rare that is these days. Which other companies does that apply to?
Someone asked Rohloff how long their bicycle hub gears last, and the answer was, "We don't know. We've only been making them for 25 years."
A lot of German SMEs still work that way, even if their big engineering companies have rather lost their way.
Lodge, the American maker of cast-iron cookware is a possibility.
I'd say it's more likely cheap imports that are the issue.
Yeah, they're known for being practically unbreakable. Couldn't tell you how many times I dropped my Duralex glasses with them not breaking.
There's a reason why worker owned companies (which were quite prevalent and a key factor in the 20th century's socialist movements) did not survive in our capitalist world. If we want to see these kinds of companies thrive, we need to change the entire market philosophy. Otherwise they will always be out-competed by companies that favour revenue/profit over worker benefits. In fact they will not even take off in the first place, because that needs capital and investors who own capital will want shares in return, which goes against the core principle of worker-ownership.
They did survive. There are thousands in Spain and Italy especially.
One of the most well-known is the Mondragon Corporation from the Basque country, one of Spain's largest comanies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
I am particularly interested in coops as a model for a tech startup. How would one go about structuring a new corporation to best ensure it remains a coop?
Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives.
You sound like you might be interested in distributism [0][1][2][3][4]. The author, John Médaille, also spoke at Google [5].
[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...
[1] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...
[2] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...
[3] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...
[4] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1PtStipIsc
Thank you for the links!
Igalia (https://www.igalia.com), also Spanish, is a fairly prominent tech company that is also a co-op.
Galois, Inc. (https://www.galois.com) is employee-owned, and they do lots of great formal methods work.
But not sure whether this model is appropriate for a startup. I guess splitting stock more evenly is a good starting point.
Plenty of worker owned software consultancies in germany, and specially in Hamburg for some reason.
From the site of one that I that I used to work for(they are very friendly so you can hit them up if you want some advice on setting up one)
> How exactly are you structured?
> In our search for a structure that consistently implements the principles of responsible ownership, we came across the veto-share model. First, the principles are enshrined in the company's articles of association. Then, company shares are transferred to a controlling shareholder. This controlling shareholder is granted veto rights, which must be used to prevent any future deviation from the principles. We are delighted to have the Purpose Foundation on board as our controlling shareholder!
> We want to offer every (new) team member the long-term prospect of assuming entrepreneurial responsibility as a co-owner. The criteria for this are already defined in the articles of association. To simplify joining and leaving, we have established dyve Trust eGbR, a partnership that holds 99% of the voting rights in dyve.
https://dyve.agency/warum-wir-es-tun
Thanks!
Look for successful models I guess
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tech-startup+cooperatives&ia=web
Mondragon is often used by people who don't know much about the subject as a counter example, but if you look under the hood, you'll see it doesn't even compare: Less than half the workers own shares and the majority of shares is held by a small circle of executives in the richest branches. That's basically a standard capitalist pig with some socialist lipstick to give pseudo-Marxists an argument in these discussions, when there is none to be had in the first place. In fact Nvidia has a higher percentage of employees owning shares than Mondragon. Would you call that "worker-owned" too?
None of this should be surprising either, because anything that truly benefits workers will be at odds with things that benefit the business. In society there are always people who primarily get paid and people who primarily work. Even the real Marx realized that. If you really want to defeat capitalism, then you have to do more than just play pretend.
> anything that truly benefits workers will be at odds with things that benefit the business.
Generally yes, unless the workers own the business.
There are many successful co-ops all over the world, including in the US. You just don't hear about them because they don't look much different from corporations from the perspective of the average person.
Such companies are more common than you think.
The main they don't survive is not due to capitalism. (Capitalism is just trade without use of force at the end of the day) but due to the lobbying power of corporations. Corporations constantly lobby the government for more regulation and rules, which they just budget for, but smaller companies don't have the funds to meet so they cannot stay in business. Look at the first couple of years of COVID for example, Walmart, Target and the big box stores lobbied the government to stay open because they were "essential" while all the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power.
The solution is to stop giving corporations the ability to lobby governments, and stop using the government to control/fund markets. Not to blame it on capitalism.
> the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power
Small businesses have a lot if lobbying power (NFIB, US Chamber of Commerce to a certain extent) especially during the pandemic. The PPP loan forgiveness program was ridiculously generous. Despite it being marketed as a way to save jobs, only a third of the money ended up going towards jobs that were at risk.
Those are good points, but it again shows how government getting involved does more harm than good. The government forced the lockdowns instead of letting people make their decisions about their health, then they tries to aid the businesses they caused to suffer, and most of the money didn't end up where it was supposed to. So many examples of this over and over when you look at government involvement. > The fantastic 7 tech companies, get billions of dollars from the government grants, tax breaks, business > We have 4 ISP's that monopolize the market, due to the government giving them billions of dollars to expand infrastructure, which they misappropriated and then uses for lobbying against small ISP's > The SNAP program subsidizes big companies like Walmart, target, etc due to them being able to eat the costs of all the massive regulatiom around it. > etc. etc. etc.
That's not what capitalism is... or it's a very elementary understanding of it. Trade without force existed prior to and contemporary to capitalism. (See markets and mercantilism for more history there.) Capitalism is specifically the sort of mercantilism under which maximizing one's capital (typically the money commodity) becomes the aim.
Historically, money commodity was used to mediate exchange between two other commodities - I sell my wheat, get money, use money to buy pork. I'm buying commodities because I intend to use them or share them. Commodity -> money -> commodity. Capitalism inverts this -- the goal is to maximize money. I start with money, I convert it to a commodity that I can sell for a greater value, to get larger money. Money -> commodity -> money. You see Amazon operate this way: "if we can put one dollar in and get $1.01 out, do it".
Highly recommend this book on the transition in England and France from agrarian and feudal mercantilism into capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Capitalism
Not sure about the currency vs commodity argument, but I agree with this argument linked article:
> Thus it argues that the origin of capitalism lies fundamentally in social property relations rather than in trade and commerce.
Capitalism is fundamentally a framework for ownership and property.
Thank you for that correction, I did oversimplify it.
> Capitalism inverts this -- the goal is to maximize money. I start with money, I convert it to a commodity that I can sell for a greater value, to get larger money. Money -> commodity -> money. You see Amazon operate this way: "if we can put one dollar in and get $1.01 out, do it".
Yes, that is correct and there is nothing wrong with this as long as there is no coercion happening (eg. Government involvement, lobbying and over regulation).
Every person on earth should have the right to put in $1 into something and try to get $1.01 from it. You and I and every other individual get to then decide if we want to give that business owner that $1.01 or go to a competitor. In a truly free market, that business owner only earns that $1.01 profit by providing a good or service that voluntary customers value at more than the price they pay. The profit is the reward for creating value for others
We currently live in a crony-capitalist world which has a lot of issues, but it's still much better than the 200m+ that have died under Marxism and Communism in the last 100 years.
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The whole article documents a product that people do want and like so much that they're willing to donate 4x what the owner-operators of the company asked for.
It's odd to see you expressing disdain for 'high school politics' and 'because younger generations don't know' while also displaying such ignorance or disregard of the subject matter, like watching factual waves roll in and dash themselves on the rocks of obdurate opinion.
The article is about a failing company on the verge of bankruptcy and which already went bankrupt 4 times this century, with turnover down 20% over the last 10 years...
My reply was to a specific comment. I do express disdain for those who preach socialism in 2025 because, as an European who was alive during the 20th century and has some mileage I do know the subject matter... And everyone should, too because of the ample historical and economic record available for all to study. Hence, "youth" is the only generous 'excuse' as the debate was conclusively settled by the 1980s. Judging by the puerile reactions I will go with that... Please refrain from the typical ad hominem attacks and insults.
I'm probably older than you; perhaps that's why your argumentation seems so juvenile. It seems not to have occurred to you that bankruptcies can occur other than for reasons of pure supply and demand or product quality.
You realize there's an entire spectrum of socialist ideology between liberalism and authoritarian planned economies, yeah? It's not a Boolean, and it's not a slippery slope. We could have broadly liberal markets owned and run by the workers, and without the authoritarianism.
This is a slippery slope... The comment I replied to is an example of that: specifically on this aspect, it doesn't really matter whether a company is owned and run by the workers (we can have thay today and we do), but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete. Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope that ends badly, always.
Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.
Socialism can indeed only ends one way and that is the removal of individual freedoms.
It's not about eliminating competition. It's about trying to create an economic environment where companies are incentivized to compete by actually producing value rather than:
- Regulatory capture
- Buying out their competitors
- Being cheaper at the cost of horrible externalities
And the many other failure modes of "free markets".
Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope
Nobody is doing that. The article specifically mentions pursuing opportunities in the export market.
Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.
The workers bought out the previous owners, presumably due to frustration with the firm having had 4 near-collapses in the last 20 years under the capitalistic management approach.Your objections seem conditioned rather than considered; did you actually think any of this through, or are just just reacting to concepts that make you uncomfortable while overlooking the facts?
> but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete
There is no such thing as an actual "free market", nor should there be. Markets need rules to operate otherwise you get fraud and "unhealthy" competition like sabotage and assassinations.
> Socialism can indeed only ends one way and that is the removal of individual freedoms.
That's like saying that capitalism only ends one way and that is slavery.
In reality, there is no inherently slippery slope in either direction. There is a spectrum of ways to aporoach market regulation and individual freedom with various tradeoffs.
Blind partisan rhetoric like yours doesn't help uncover what those tradeoffs are so we can make good decisions. Instead it spreads ignorance and division.
Are you honestly comparing their proposal to the USSR and the "proletarian dictatorship imposed at gun point" to democratically changing laws to force all companies to become worker owned cooperatives?
At the end of the day, if we had a million worker owned cooperatives, they would still need to compete. Since workers from Coop1 need to sell better products than workers from Coop2, otherwise they will still lose their jobs.
Also, the current setup is a race to the bottom: lowest quality that doesn't self destruct immediately (aka planned obsolescence), dumping ALL externalities onto the general public: ideally with the same timed fuse approach so that it's not noticed immediately (dumping toxic waste in rivers, polluting the earth and the air, oil spills, etc - the list is endless), all in the name of a slightly lower initial price to attract customers. It's not sustainable.
While there is no shortage of irrelevant details, the article is very light on relevant details. What prevents the factory from staying in business? Not enough orders? The French people supposedly love this glassware and orders pour in whenever the company is mentioned. They have the factory up and running, they have employees. The workers own the means of production, what could be better than that?
Why do they need to expand into new product ranges, if the existing products are in such high demand? I'm not sure if the proposed pint glasses for British pubs are a sure winner. Why not stick with what already works?
None of this is explained in the article.
As a French, my guess is simply that the brand is not price competitive and up until now, they didn't have the right marketing to justify the higher prices.
Duralex is a beloved brand, and the French wouldn't like to see it go, but not enough to have much of an influence in the shopping aisle. The nostalgia aspect is real (ask the French about the numbers at the bottom of the glass ;) ), but it may be a negative when looking for more "adult" glassware. Maybe you don't want your guests or yourself feel like your are in a school canteen. School canteens also don't have a reputation for being luxurious to say the least, which may be a problem if you want to charge a premium. It may be that's the idea behind the pint glasses by the way. Show that Duralex can make glassware for grownups too.
A Danish supermarket had a loyalty program where you'd collect point and could get Duralex drinking glasses for the points. We got probably 25 of them, I don't think I'd consider buying anything else going forward, the quality is absolutely worth the minimal extra cost. You can get six for around €25EUR that is basically free.
I don't agree that they aren't price competitive, at least on normal drinking glasses.
Create a separate high-end brand, Duralux.
Here you can buy 250 ml glasses for 1.39 Euro a piece. Even cheaper for sets. I’m not sure how cheap we need glasses to be?
Yes, exactly. I think the problem is the opposite. They failed to market them correctly so that they can demand higher prices.
It is more expensive than for example IKEA glasses, but I swear by Duralex.
Ever since an IKEA glass spontaneously exploded on my desk.
I suddenly remembered we used Duralex at school in Sweden in the 90s, so I ordered brand new Duralex glasses and no explosions yet.
I imagine if they were being used in schools, with 13-17 year olds, being washed every day for years until they were covered in scratches, they must be pretty tough.
Duralex uses (used?) a special glass that made the glass bounce off the floor several times before breaking, and most times it didn’t break.
That’s also why canteens loved it.
Buy Duralex — the glassware that won't explode soon.
Buy Duralex — the glassware that soon won't explode.
Yes, we had them in school in the UK too. Just had a flashback to the number at the bottom of the glass
The issue is that it is difficult to find a marketing justification for high prices in everyday glassware... nothing more like a glass than another glass and people are obviously not prepared to pay a premium.
I guess they have the same problem that Superfest glass from the GDR had, the glasses just don't break often enough.
Indeed.
I use only borosilicate glass vessels for cooking, for storing food, for eating and for drinking (some from France, some from Czechia).
I have replaced some of them in order to have more optimized sizes and shapes for the ways I use them (even if the replaced vessels were still perfectly good), and I have some extra vessels kept in reserve for the very unlikely case when I will break a vessel (which has not happened yet).
I do not expect that I would need to buy any more such vessels during my lifetime, unless I will become bored of those that I have and I would want a change.
So making money from selling high-quality glassware that can last forever is much more difficult than getting free money from a software subscription.
Exactly. All my glassware are Duralex including coffe cups, and I haven't broken a single glass in 25+ years. Yet, they regularly fall on the ceramic kitchen floor from a hip level.
> Why not stick with what already works?
Well, apparently it doesn't work. Personally I think almost all their glassware is either ugly or generic.
We had Duralex glasses in my schools' canteens. Not because they were high-quality but because they were cheap and (back then, at least) they readily shattered. I can buy basically the same quality glasses for 1/3 or 1/4 the price from ikea. Don't think they can compete on price with glasses made in China, Vietnam, Bulgaria or wherever production is cheapest these days.
Products which don't respect all the environment, the workers and the consumers are cheaper; much cheaper.
You can't win when other players are playing a different game.
This is another report from another French glass manufacturer. They couldn't meet their social responsibilty. Workers close the plant, and then the Mayor was pushing an unrelated company inthe viccinity, Nestle, to take over the failing glass plant
https://www.glass-international.com/news/o-i-halts-french-gl...
That’s all true, but to be clear, the Mayor supported the workers and wanted Nestle to take over the failing plant.
I have bought a lot of glassware over a couple decades. My usual trick is to look at restaurant supply shops, since they usually have a wide variety to select trade offs in style, price, quality, etc. Somehow I’d never come across Duralex until a few months ago when I was shopping to reorganize my own cupboards. The Duralex stuff I got has been the best glassware I’ve ever had, hands down. I’ll probably order more to put in storage just in case their ongoing struggles disrupt availability in the future.
I get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product.
I've never bought a glass in my life. We just use old Vegemite jars here in Australia.
Many years ago it was Hershey chocolate fudge jars that we’d put in the cupboard when they were empty. Then shrinkflation led to smaller jars and it lost some of the charm. I still have a few of the old ones.
Jam jars were way more common. As a kid, I might've seen one Vegemite jar for every twenty or so jam jars.
I still use Duralex glassware I bought 15 years ago. The plastic lids are not in the best shape anymore, but they are still closing just fine.
Maybe I'm not that great a customer for the company.
Totally superior but it’s the one type of glass my dishwasher just cannot seem to get clean. I wonder what the reason is.
> I get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product.
Where are you? Here in France they are not expensive. I bought them at Carrefour when I moved here because I liked the Picardie shape and I thought they were just one of many companies that makes them. They were surprisingly cheap (a bit more than 1 euro per glass iirc).
I’m in the USA. I can drop into the local Target and pick up a set of 6 pint glasses for around $10. Meanwhile a set of 6 Picardie 500ml glasses is $48 at Williams-Sonoma. (A bit cheaper online.) Worth every penny so far.
Bought one in Berlin and I would say they are 2-3 times the price of the cheapest competitor, but still worth it. I believe the US used to have their own more rectangular version of the glass.
The article doesn't even mention that this company already went bankrupt once this century, in 2008. Like some of the other posters, I furnished my cupboards with Duralex decades ago and never needed any more. In the same way, I filled my flatware drawers with Oneida decades before Oneida disappeared, and my plates are all from some long-forgotten Swedish stoneware maker, and I bought all my furniture from a dead Italian brand at a showroom that no longer exists in San Francisco. I have a personal pet theory on this, which is that the astronomical cost of housing has squeezed out all other aspects of home furnishing from people's budgets, in a race to the bottom where the last brand standing is Ikea.
The housing theory of everything, indeed.
Also, smaller family sizes means people are inheriting such things rather than buying them. If anything, there's antique overload.
I remember looking at their website and thinking the product design was horrible. The "Picardie" design is iconic, but not really in a good way. In my mind it says "functional" and "old". That's probably unfair, but it is what it is. Everything else they have is generic in the extreme. The IKEA catalog has far more interesting glassware.
Funny that you mention IKEA. I have 4 very old IKEA glasses that were made by Duralex. I just love the fact that they're about as old as I am (40 next year) and we're able to survive that long. I consider them to be the peak of IKEA glassware. Today IKEA glasses are known to be breaking easy - sometimes simply by getting hot in the dishwasher. The design might look fresher, but they won't last.
The rest of my glasses (most) are Duralex as well. They're just very ... durable. I was kind of getting annoyed that the brand became so popular that I see them everywhere now (every other cafe serves water in them). I'm not French btw, my love for the glasses simply comes from seeing them outlast time and many pretty dramatic falls (a few times on hard ceramic tiles from a meter up and bouncing up almost as high again - leaving a few nearby mouths agape in the process). But reading that they're a worker owned cooperative makes me want to buy many more from them. That's what I want: Stuff that's build to last a long time by people who can live from their work. Who cares if they look dated? For something that's used daily being old is a testament to their quality. I use my IKEA-Duralex glasses almost daily. They look much cooler than any new shit with their battle-scars ight scratches :-D). IKEA is literally the opposite.
Definitely looks like something you’d see in a 1970s movie or your grandma’s old cupboard.
Yeah. They're grandma glasses at this point.
To each their own. What you call old I call classic. I have bought a few of these pieces and they look great.
I’m not sure my drinking glasses are a place I really need “modern” and “new” and “whatever the opposite of functional” is. It’s a glass for drinking liquid out of. There is no innovation. There is no novel design yet to be found. It’s an almost ancient device. It should be functional above all else. They are for drinking water out of, not fucking decor.
And for what it’s worth, if you don’t like the Picardie glasses, they have like a dozen other shapes that might feel “modern” enough.
They essentially become norm-core style. You will see them at your grandparents and hipster cafes.
A few years ago, a journalist went to Duralex, after they restructured (to be own by the employees), and show off the glasses's solidity, live. Every single one of them broke:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x957g7q
Woops
I know Duralex because they're the de facto coffee cup for a latte in the world's best cafes. I dunno how or why it happened, but since about 2008 if you go to a cafe in Melbourne and your latte comes in anything BUT one of those Duralex glasses, you should run for the hills.
The brand suffered from energy price hikes, felt particularly sharply after 2022, and its marketing could clearly be improved. Only now, after more than two or three decades, are new designs finally appearing on the roadmap.
These glasses were once ubiquitous in public middle-school cafeterias, so the emotional attachment runs deep across generations.
> the soaring cost of gas and electricity were the firm’s largest and most worrying expense
Difficult to have factories when basic utilities are expensive. China has a big advantage there as well, not just in labour costs. They invested heavily in energy infrastructure over the past few decades.
How did they invest in that infrastructure ? The LGFVs they used for that are so large the only way to pay for their loans is to throw in new LGFVs.
If there's a place where the music will stop really suddenly and really hard, it's in China, where all this infrastructure to build cheap glasses will completely crumble under the cost of its own financing. They're not increasing margins, so they're not gonna match their bond yields...
If they experience a flood of orders every time they are mentioned in the media and people flock to throw them money when they are in trouble, it seems like they should raise prices commensurate with their costs increasing and should probably invest in a little advertising. The brand seems strong and undamaged but they continue to struggle? That seems like a pretty easy fix.
New products and new markets clearly help finances. Burning that much gas has got to be their major expense. Are there other way to heat the furnaces?
When they recently decided solar furnaces were not cost effective for electricity production (compared to solar panels), I did wonder if they couldn't be adapted to the production of energy intensive products like glass, bricks, or concrete.
Glass furnaces operate somewhere around 1500 C. Electrical heating would work, but that's also quite expensive, usually even more so.
What they'd want to do is try to recover and reuse heat. In principle, there's no reason "new" heat has to be added each time they heat a batch of glass, if heat can be transferred from cooling glass back to the input materials.
> What they'd want to do is try to recover and reuse heat. In principle, there's no reason "new" heat has to be added each time they heat a batch of glass, if heat can be transferred from cooling glass back to the input materials.
Have you worked in any industrial or craft setting involving molten glass or metal? Walked around a workshop? There's no way the heat is going back into the process.
I know there are industrial processes where heat is efficiently recycled, but I agree there are serious practical problems, particularly if the molten glass must be cooled quickly. Still, even somewhat lower grade heat can be upgraded back to high grade heat with high temperature heat pumps.
Sometimes, but not often. These furnaces burn for like 20 years at a time, so gas is pretty common.
During a trip to Venice I had the good fortune of touring http://www.giuman.it/ and it was highly educational. Bringing the furnaces up to temperature takes time and turning them off each day isn't a good option. Gas comes primarily from Russia and price spikes have really hurt the business.
Selling products based on nostalgia does not work. Europe needs to do far more keep it's industry afloat and to make locally produced products competitive.
Duralex is currently selling products at 10x the costs of what a similar product, made in China, costs on Amazon. This is not sustainable. These enormous differences in prices mean that only very people can afford their products. It is a brand which sells an everyday item at prices, which are legitimately hard to afford for most of the population.
Obviously a company like this can not succeed long term. It is totally uncompetitive, except for some brand recognition and positive brand perception. These obviously help, but will do nothing for the long term success.
Which products are you talking about...? Duralex is not really expensive at all.
For example, Duralex drinking glass Le Picardie (as in the article), transparent, 36 cl, 18.90 EUR for 6-pack.
That is 3.15 EUR per glass.
At that price the price/quality is extremely good. Chinese products won't even come close to this.
Duralex were used and loved in Spain, too. Most houses still have some of them, although nowadays there's lot more competition. I would pay twice for their glassware, quality-wise is good stuff.
French Canadian here - I remember my mom loving these glasses, back in the 70s-80s. We still use some of them 50 years later. They last for decades.
Grew up with Duralex Provence as the 'regular milk / water glass' here in Norway. Never broke one by accident. Excellent glasses.
Years ago I bought a bunch of duralex glasses, to replace my faded college IKEA plasticware. I still have every single one of them, and none are worse for wear. They've been dropped, survived several moves, and even toddlers, and are still going strong
For those understanding french, a little funny video about Duralex history made by Karambolage a few years ago: https://youtu.be/H9T7JCCDeCE?t=5s
Duralex is good quality anyway, very strong against breaking but they do scratch pretty badly
The reason you see a lot of scratches on Duralex glasses in cafés and canteens is because they are so old, having lasted an order of magnitude longer than other glassware.
They make great glassware, very scratch and chip resistant.
That's probably their problem, cheap and long lasting isn't good for business.
Their products are extremely expensive.
As others have said, no they are not, here in France.
I'm not sure you can see this page, but it's a set of four 16cl Picardie glasses for 3.79 euro: https://www.carrefour.fr/p/gobelet-picardie-duralex-35501905...
Uhh, no? A pack of 6 Picardie glasses retails for €20, so they're a little over €3 each.
https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Duralex-Picardie-Set-Clear-Glasse...
Apparently 3.14$US on amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Duralex-picardie-clear-tumbler-ounce/...
Even in the US looking at their site I’m not getting sticker shock from anything I’m seeing.
How much are they in your area?
Duralex glass and Nokia phone = ultimate phone indestructible and long lasting
I love these glasses. I'm drinking out of one right now
Great product
I don’t understand the comments here crowing about how this employee-owned company is a success story against capitalism or something. It was going to go out of business, employees bought it, they also couldn’t make it profitable and had to resort to effectively a gofundme to not collapse. And somehow this is a win against profit driven companies? Do you not see how utterly non-viable this is at scale?
Well the initial financial problems were under a traditional profit driven scheme. Almost certainy they wouldn't have got the donations they are getting today if they had remained in that model so the employee-owned scheme is at least somewhat better. It is also likely that, in addiiton to donations, they are getting extra sales by being employee-owened, at least in France.
Ultimately though it's probably the whole market theey are in (relatively cheap household goods) that is difficult for a company based in a rich country, whatever their ownership model.