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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Totally superior but it’s the one type of glass my dishwasher just cannot seem to get clean. I wonder what the reason is.
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.
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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 is currently selling products at 10x the costs of what a similar product, made in China, costs on Amazon.
Got some links to the Chinese glasses of comparable quality?
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.
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
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.
For those understanding french, a little funny video about Duralex history made by Karambolage a few years ago: https://youtu.be/H9T7JCCDeCE?t=5s
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.
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.
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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.