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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
That’s also why canteens loved it.
I don't agree that they aren't price competitive, at least on normal drinking glasses.
Well, apparently it doesn't work. Personally I think almost all their glassware is either ugly or generic.
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.
One of the most well-known is the Mondragon Corporation from the Basque country, one of Spain's largest comanies:
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.
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-...
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.
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.
Generally yes, unless the workers own the business.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
So it's a mix of history, tradition, enjoying good products, the pride you get from your country producing good products.
Sad how rare that is these days. Which other companies does that apply to?
A lot of German SMEs still work that way, even if their big engineering companies have rather lost their way.
These glasses were once ubiquitous in public middle-school cafeterias, so the emotional attachment runs deep across generations.
https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Duralex-Picardie-Set-Clear-Glasse...
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...
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.
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.
Got some links to the Chinese glasses of comparable quality?
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_coop%C3%A9ra...
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.
On the other hand, I suspect that this also makes it more difficult for them to change and adapt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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 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).
Maybe I'm not that great a customer for the company.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Great product
lostlogin•2mo ago
hhh•2mo ago
pfdietz•2mo ago
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.
rlonstein•2mo ago
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.
pfdietz•2mo ago
rlonstein•2mo ago
My experience working with glass is that you _don't_ want it cooled quickly. It will shatter or get internal stresses that cause it to shatter later. You anneal it in a slowly cooling oven over time. Some steels and brass can be annealed slowly and that heat could, I suppose, be captured. Tempering probably not.
> Still, even somewhat lower grade heat can be upgraded back to high grade heat with high temperature heat pumps.
Which requires energy and incurs losses. If you have energy, assuming electricity, that's cheap enough to scavenge low-level waste heat you probably don't need to recapture the heat.
GeekyBear•2mo ago